Alan Boraas

Alan S. Boraas (born April 15, 1947) is a professor of anthropology at Kenai Peninsula College in Alaska. He is known for his research into the culture, history, and archaeology of the peoples of the Cook Inlet area of Alaska, and in particular has worked closely with the Dena'ina people of the Kenai Peninsula. He is an adopted member of the Kenaitze Indian Tribe, and is helping the tribe develop a program to teach the Dena'ina language.

With James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center, Boraas coedited the book Dena’ina Legacy — K’tl’egh’i Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky by Peter Kalifornsky. Boraas also wrote the biography of Kalifornsky included in the volume.

Boraas was raised on a wheat farm in Minnesota. After high school he attended University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. On a whim, he took a class in anthropology in his freshman year, and loved it so much that he sought out a summer position as an archaeological helper, though normally the school hired only graduate students. His persistence paid off and he was offered work at an archaeological dig at Mille Lacs, Minnesota, where his farm background came in handy, as he was one of the few students who could operate the heavy equipment used to move dirt away from the site after initial excavation by hand. A highlight of his work there was his first archaeological find: a red stone spear point that he found in 1966. When he took it to the director, he was told, "That's about 2,000 years old." The experience hooked him on archaeology. He worked on the Mille Lacs project for two summers, then worked a summer with an on-call team responsible for evaluating archaeological finds at construction projects and other such happenstance discoveries. He graduated from University of Minnesota in 1969 with a B.A. in anthropology and a minor in geology.

His choice of school for pursuit of a higher degree was arbitrary: the first university catalog on the shelf for the As was for University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). He attended UAF for a year and worked the following summer with a UAF team scouting the route of the upcoming Trans-Alaska Pipeline for archaeological sites. He then transferred to University of Toronto, where he earned a Master of Arts in Anthropology in 1971.

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