ALPENA, Michigan-Ken McQuarrie grew up two blocks from Thunder Bay, in Alpena, where his dad and uncles were divers. One uncle explored shipwrecks in the bay.
But McQuarrie never learned to dive, and began attending Alpena Community College after he graduated high school. He started working to make ends meet after having his first child at 17 and second at 22.
One day, when his youngest son was in high school, McQuarrie attended a career fair. One of the displays was striking: an underwater remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, set up in a big fish tank. By its side was David Cummins, an instructor at ACC and adviser for the college's Marine Technology Pathways program.
"I picked up the remote and David was like, 'You're pretty good at this. You ever think about doing anything with underwater robots?'" McQuarrie said.
McQuarrie enrolled in the two-year course. One day in 2015, after training in the harbor, he met University of Michigan archeologist John O'Shea, who was returning to the marina after a research trip on the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, an underwater ridge that runs from Alpena to Amberley, Ontario. He was investigating potential ancient caribou hunting sites, locate on what would have been dry land between 8,000 and 11,000 years ago.
"I volunteered to work with him," McQuarrie said. "I didn't ever need my name involved in any research or anything like that. I just wanted to be part of it."
McQuarrie spent his first day with O'Shea's team drawing on his internship experience on research vessels in the Gulf of Mexico, deploying the ROV and managing its tether. The tether, a cord that includes both power to the ROV and telecommunications between the robot and boat, is the most important part of the job.
After that day, O'Shea offered McQuarrie a contractor position.
"I remember getting that first paycheck with the University of Michigan all over it. I've grown up as a U-M fan my whole life. The opportunity to work with the University of Michigan, the opportunity to work with Dr. O'Shea-that was a dream come true."
Since the work began in 2008, O'Shea's team has identified 72 probable sites. Twelve of these have been confirmed to date, and include caribou hunting sites, camps and stone caches. The discoveries have led to a sustained underwater archaeology research project, one that involves community volunteers, college and high school teachers and students, and which has even changed the way people of this remote, northern Michigan region think about their own history.
Science in the sanctuary
O'Shea began examining the ridge on maps of the lake floor released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association in 2008. NOAA designated the waters of Thunder Bay as a National Marine Sanctuary in 2000; Lake Huron, in this area, is littered with historically significant shipwrecks from the 19th and 20th centuries. O'Shea became involved because, during a period of low lake levels, people were looting the shipwrecks.
But on the lake bottom surveys, O'Shea suspected another story could be taking place. He realized the Alpena-Amberley Ridge would have been a dry spine of land connecting northern lower Michigan to southern Ontario just after glaciers retreated from the Michigan region and as the Great Lakes as we know them today were forming. He knew from his other research that hunters often use natural land formations like this as choke points to hunt migratory caribou (closely related cousins to reindeer).
With funding from the National Science Foundation, O'Shea and his research team began scanning the ridge and started to spot oddly shaped groupings of stone-piles large enough a human could crouch behind them. They also discovered lines of stone that couldn't be made by the natural push and pull of current or ice. Their conclusion? Hunting blinds and drive lanes, created by humans between 8,000 and 11,000 years ago for hunting caribou.
To share his discoveries, O'Shea frequently gives talks at NOAA's Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center, the visitor's center associated with the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. And at the beginning of winter term each school year, O'Shea visits the classroom of Alpena High School science teacher Erich Schlueter.
Schlueter teaches a class called Science in the Sanctuary, a course in which students explore different kinds of science that takes place at the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. O'Shea gives a talk about his underwater archaeology, and then he and Schlueter try to interest the students the best way they know how: through a video game.
The game is a simulation O'Shea designed with the help of Bob Reynolds from Wayne State University. Reynolds specializes in using artificial intelligence in gaming, and O'Shea needed a way to predict where hunting blinds may be located along the 90-mile-long, 9-mile-wide ridge.
Reynolds worked with O'Shea to design a game with artificially intelligent caribou, and using a virtual reality headset and controllers, high school students can follow caribou as they wander the ancient land bridge. In Schlueter's classroom, students can step into the virtual reality of what Lake Huron looked like 10,000 years ago any time they like.
As the students explore the ancient landscape, they can see where hunting structures have already been discovered and try to predict other locations that might be suitable. When they find a likely location, students record the coordinates of the site, which then O'Shea and his team can check in reality, on the lake.
"We gave them not just the virtual world, but also the sonar output and the mapping output of the bathymetry, so they're bringing in all these different kinds of information sources," O'Shea said. "End of the year, we take the five top predictions, and we actually go out and check them. The first year we did this, they actually found a new site."
A summer of research
There were days during his summer with the team, McQuarrie said, where the crew was 45 miles out from Alpena and the water was smooth as glass-no ripples, no waves. Another time, McQuarrie took his drone and filmed the boat, no land in sight. Beneath the water, McQuarrie's job was to drive the ROV over potential hunting sites. Once located, O'Shea and his team would suit up and dive down, following the robot's tether to investigate the lake bottom.
Caribou and reindeer have a behavioral quirk in which they tend to follow lines, O'Shea said. Ancient hunters-and their contemporary counterparts-know this.
"Modern day herders of reindeer in Siberia, if they want the herd to go in a particular place, they just cut brush, and lay lines on the ground. That's enough to channel the direction the animals move," O'Shea said. "Hunters knew that too, and so what they do is try to create linear structures, so as the animals are migrating, they'll just tend to follow that way, and you can guide animals into a predetermined kill cell."
This tends to make identification of these hunting sites relatively straightforward, O'Shea said. McQuarrie would have been looking for large boulders arranged in a long, straight line that terminated in a V-shaped hunting blind. The hunting blind served both to shield hunters from the caribou's vision, and also to funnel caribou through a narrow exit toward waiting hunters.
This particular arrangement of rock-in curving lines and v-shaped combinations do not tend to form naturally, nor in the specific locations most suitable for intercepting migrating caribou. This helps researchers decide which sites to visually inspect through dives and sampling, O'Shea said. Then, to confirm that a structure or site was human-made, the researchers apply a gold standard: artifacts, or other forms of debris from cultural activity.
Around many of the sites, the researchers have found not only the small tools, blades and other items that would have been used for hunting, but also flakes of obsidian. Obsidian didn't form in the Great Lakes region, O'Shea says, and lab testing of the recovered flakes confirmed the obsidian to be from central Oregon-only reaching ancient hunters in the Great Lakes region through a system of trade.
"What distinguishes these sites from terrestrial archaeology is that the land form hasn't been modified since it went underwater," O'Shea said. "It's like your own Pompeii. Unlike on land, where everything gets moved around and farmers move the rocks and to build roads through it, the underwater stuff is right where it was left. We can see where the hunting sites are as opposed to where the camp sites are, and this gives you a much clearer view of the whole as it once was than you would on land."
The formation of the sites is familiar to McQuarrie, himself a deer hunter who grew up in a family of hunters.
"Seeing these lines of rocks and knowing even modern day hunters, how trails through woods and hinge-cutting trees helps guide deer to your food plots," McQuarrie said. "Who knows-they might have used those rocks plus trees or shrubs, and those trees are probably long gone after 9, 10, 11,000 years."
Deeper waters
Nearly all of the sites O'Shea's research team has investigated are in the range of 70 to 130 feet of water. These represent sites, likely constructed and used around 9,000 years ago, as the glaciers that covered the Great Lakes region were melting and slowly filling in the Lake Huron basin.
O'Shea recently was the recipient of one of five Klinsky Expedition projects, a program created by U-M alumni Steven Klinsky to support cutting edge archaeological research at the University of Michigan. For the Klinsky "moonshot" research, O'Shea's team has begun the search for sites in deeper water. These sites would be earliest, likely built around 11,000 years ago, when broad portions of the Lake Huron bottom lands would have been available for use.
For McQuarrie, who now lives near Lansing, the research experience gave him a window into what the world around Alpena looked like during a stretch of time much longer ago than the period of time that ships crashed against the treacherous beaches and terrain of Thunder Bay-and scratched a similar itch that started when he watched his family suit up to explore nearby lakes.
"I was honored the first day they allowed me to go on the boat. I'm honored to talk about it today. It's been a big bright spot in my life," McQuarrie said. "The stuff I've been able to do and see, opening up my mind, it's been amazing."
He said he still pulls up the bathymetric view of the Lake Huron bottom to show people the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, and to show them that Lake Huron used to be two separate lakes. He points out where he scoured the lake bottom with O'Shea, searching for signs of humans from generations past-45 miles from Alpena and 45 miles from the Canadian shore.
McQuarrie says it's work that also distinguishes Alpena from the rest of the state.
"There's no highways running here. It's not a destination place like Traverse City or Petoskey. Northeast Michigan is kind of quiet compared to the west side of the state," McQuarrie said. "What Dr. O'Shea has done for the community of Alpena, just by bringing this knowledge out about his research, and the stuff that the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary and NOAA has brought to light, it shines a whole new light on northeast Michigan."
