Yukon Island

Yukon Island, a small wooded island in outer Kachemak Bay south of Homer, is a major archaeological landscape that preserves evidence of repeated long-term human occupation. Its most important site, the Yukon Island Main Site, is a large shell midden where ancient female human remains were found in 1924. In the 1930s, Frederica de Laguna used this midden to build a 1,500-year chronology of human use in the area, work that shaped later archaeology around the bay. Additional midden sites, including a deep deposit interpreted as part of a village, reinforced the island’s significance despite erosion worsened by the 1964 Alaska earthquake.

Seldovia Village, Alaska · United States