PERHAPS MY EXCITEMENT about historical finds was getting the best of me, but when I arrived at Utukok I thought I'd stumbled across the half-frozen survivors of Franklin's lost Northwest Passage expedition of the 1840s. Mad Mel and I were greeted by a team of weather-beaten archaeologists who looked as if they were engaged in a high-stakes beard-growing contest. There was Tony Baker, 62, a self-proclaimed "Indian-arrowhead nut" from Denver who's been a BLM volunteer on the Slope every summer for the past seven years. Dale Slaughter, 67, is a project-based BLM employee and professional archaeologist based in Anchorage, and probably the only Alaskan who wears a beret. Standing in the door of a tent was Mystery Man, an amateur archaeologist who disdains public attention so much that he made me promise not to reveal his identity.

"I'm not here," he said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean I'm not here."

Mystery Man's voice and demeanor reminded me of Clint Eastwood from his spaghetti-western days, so I'm keeping my promise. The crew's junior member was Mylène Parisé, a slender, dark-haired 25-year-old French-Canadian archaeology student and volunteer who'd become famous around Utukok for her apple crepes (which the guys called "creepies").

The crew chief was Mike Kunz, a rugged-looking 64-year-old with wild white hair and a toothpick locked between his teeth. Kunz is a career archaeologist with the BLM's Arctic Field Office, in Fairbanks. We were standing on the southern edge of his research domain, the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska (NPRA), now managed by the BLM, which is under federal mandate to survey the cultural and natural resources on all of its lands. In this case, that job has fallen to Kunz, and he's got his work cut out for him: The 23-million-acre (think Indiana) NPRA is the largest undeveloped block of federally owned real estate in the United States. While the NPRA has yet to send a drop of oil to market, it's going to happen soon—within years rather than decades. One obstacle is that the land hasn't been completely surveyed for cultural resources. It's as if the archaeologists are there to document an old house while bulldozers wait outside to start leveling it.

For now, there are no exploratory drill rigs or fueling stations in sight, and everywhere you look it's just water, mountain, and tundra. "The reserve is 99.9 percent undisturbed by humans," Kunz said one day when we were doing some aerial recon. "Except for some different plants and animals down there, it looks the same as it did during the late Pleistocene."

The late Pleistocene epoch (125,000 to 10,000 years ago) is of big-time interest to Kunz because it holds the key to who the first Americans were and how they lived. Currently, the oldest scientifically accepted dates for human occupation of the Western Hemisphere are clustered around 13,000 to 14,000 years ago. But some archaeologists will tell you that there should be human artifacts almost twice that old, and they'd like to find them. "Someone wants the biggest truck, someone wants the most expensive TV," explained Kunz. "Many archaeologists would love to say, 'I have the oldest date for humans in the New World.'" Kunz will show you where many of those artifacts might come from—right here in the NPRA.

As a graduate student in the mid-sixties, Kunz worked at the Blackwater Draw site, near Clovis, New Mexico, where spear points were found among mammoth skeletons dating to 13,300 years ago. The hunters are known as the Clovis culture, and subsequent discoveries suggest that these people were the first to widely settle North America. As such, their signature points are extraordinarily valuable. Recently, a private collector bought the well-known Fenn Cache, comprising 23 Clovis points and other artifacts, from another collector for a rumored $1 million plus. The initial discovery of Clovis, along with other groups of ice-age hunters, known collectively as Paleo-Indians, presented a mystery about the peopling of the Americas. If man entered the New World at the oldest archaeological site, that would mean he popped out of the ground on the Great Plains. "It was like these people spontaneously generated," explained Kunz. Some scientists guessed that Paleo-Indians originated from Pacific Islanders blown astray. Most argued Siberia or Western Europe. Some even suggested outer space. But each hypothesis was plagued by a lack of proof.

Then, in 1978, while Kunz was doing archaeological survey work on the NPRA, which occupies land that was once the doormat for the Bering land bridge, he made an astounding discovery on top of a prominent bluff. "When I walked up there," he said, "the first thing I saw, I said, 'This looks a lot like a Paleo-Indian point.' Then I found another one. And another one."

Kunz's team excavated 150 projectile points dating all the way back to 13,600 years ago. While the area was not the oldest known site in North America, Kunz was the first to find tangible proof of a connection between the Bering land bridge and Paleo-Indians of the High Plains. In 1993, he published his findings in Science, and his discovery was covered by everyone from Sam Donaldson to the BBC.

But the second piece to the Paleo-Indian puzzle remains unresolved: Did humans cross the Bering land bridge into the New World thousands of years earlier than 13,600 years ago? A discovery of that importance could completely rewrite our understanding of human history in the New World. Kunz thinks it's possible, and he and his teams have been looking for evidence in the NPRA.

"There's a site in Siberia that's 30,000 years old," he told me, referring to the Yana site, discovered in 1993. "Siberia's only 60 miles away from Alaska. Granted, these Siberians didn't wake up that day and say, 'Fred, let's go toward North America.' But they were on the path. I wouldn't be surprised to find something that's 20,000 years old out here. Maybe older. It's going to be very difficult. A lot of the earliest sites are now underwater. But we could find them. I think we will find them. It's just a matter of time."