The Finding Of A UK Researcher & Antarctic Archaeology

Last week, it was learned that the body of UK Researcher Dennis Bell, who fell into a crevasse in a glacier in 1959, had finally been found. The main reason for this is devastating climate change, which allowed the glacier to melt enough to find the body, which had previously been considered impossible. Dennis was a British meteorologist, so what in the world does that have to do with archaeology?

Source: Wiki Commons (Jerzy Strzelecki)

Antarctic Expeditions

It’s easier to make the connection than one might think, although there is some interesting roundabout thinking involved. For one, there isn’t much archaeology to be done in the Antarctic at first glance. Humans have not lived there significantly long, so any archaeology would be done on modern bodies. Which is something archaeologists are called in to do, particularly in forensics, and using excavation techniques to find the remains of past Antarctic expeditions would be fascinating if it were a little less dangerous.

However, as I showed in my breakdown of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, just because those past researchers were not necessarily archaeologists doesn’t mean they weren’t associated with archaeologists. There is a clear archaeological theme present in Lovecraft’s tale, despite the absence of any “named” archaeologists. I broke this down in more detail there, but the cultural ideas that rose up around Antarctic expeditions are the real proof.

There are plenty of examples of something ancient, usually horrific, being found deep under the ice. The Thing and Alien Vs. Predator being prime examples. The game, Conarium, is based on At the Mountains of Madness and includes many of the same ideas. The idea that something could be lurking hidden beneath the ice that changes everything we know about ancient humans is an intriguing one. And here’s where I think there’s some truth to the idea.

Climate Change & Melting Ice

The glaciers are melting. That has been provably true, due to cases like Dennis Bell. However, this is also visible on Everest, where less and less stable paths to the top are remaining, and people have been falling into newly revealed crevasses more and more. And I think there are some cases where we will find new archaeological discoveries.

Ötzi was found in a similar situation in 1991. A body so preserved that they thought it was a modern forensics case, coming out of a glacier. As more and more glaciers melt, it’s possible we find more ancient bodies, or at the very least the bodies of previous modern explorers that were thought lost forever. It could bring comfort to some families that are still left behind, and end a few mysteries still out there.

Not that we should be rooting for climate change. The devastating effects on real, living people are not worth the cost. As archaeologists, it’s almost always a balancing act of respecting the dead and the living, which is often weighted in favor of the most wealthy party’s interests. In this case, there’s very little recoverable from Antarctica that would be worth the cost.

That said, depending on your view of how the continents ended up where they are today, there might be some validity to something being preserved under the ice that we haven’t found before. Do I believe there are ancient aliens or cosmic horrors waiting for us? No. But I do think it’s possible that we find interesting fossils.

We won’t know until more of the ice melts, and then we might have much bigger problems than whether or not we’ve found a new species of dinosaur.

But Dennis isn’t the only one that was lost in the ice. The most stirring part of the article for me was the quote from BAS director Jane Francis, when he said that the discovery brought closure to a, “Decades-long mystery and reminds us of the human stories embedded in the history of Antarctic science."

As long as humans have known about Antarctica, there has been a drive to explore it, to find new human stories in the ice. Humans are known for their curiosity and their drive to discover what’s been lost. And that is what archaeology is all about, and what we hope to find and show in our research. We want to tell the best human stories we can, and this case highlights that in a poignant way.