Last Survey of the Season

Morning light

The museum has been trying to squeeze in the last field survey of the season before the weather turns cold and nasty. A few weeks ago when we were picking dates, there were really only two days that were going to work for both Ryan (my field assistant) and I - October 6 and 7. I was worried that by October we could be having frequent nasty storms. I need not have worried for those two dates (see sunshine and glassy waters in our photos), but it's a good thing we got the survey done when we did. Tonight a big storm is rolling in.

We surveyed a lake on our way to our final destination, and then got dropped off in a bay. We spent one night, and got picked up the next day on the other side of the bay. I'll admit that it was a little chilly and we never got direct sunlight on our second day, but without wind and rain a little cold is very manageable. There were some fantastic bear trails to follow in the woods most of the way, and even though we saw lots of sign, we didn't see any bears up close (we saw two from a distance on the beach). It was a very successful archaeological survey to boot - located two previously documented sites and identified five new  ones.

Keller (our pilot) waiting for us on the lake

Best field assistant ever

Looking for charcoal in the soil probe

Our camp site on a spit

Akun Island

Last week I took a quick trip to Akun Island in the Aleutians.  We chartered a plane from Anchorage and were gone for only four nights.  As usual, the Aleutians did not disappoint with spectacular views, interesting beaches, and archaeological sites.  With a little luck we had a break in the weather, and were able to perform our hydrographic survey from the little inflatable boat we brought with us.  Here are a few of my photos.

Artifacts we found lying exposed on the ground in a circle of cobles

Beach vegetation making art in the wind

Getting ready to launch the boat and go survey

Eric standing in a Aleut house pit

Beachcombing

East end of Surf Bay

Our chartered flight.  A Pilatus PC-12

Volunteering at the Kashevaroff Site

While I was in Kodiak I was able to participate in the Alutiiq Museum's Community Archaeology excavation as a volunteer. It was very exciting to show up and not be in charge. I got to dig, dig, dig, all day long, which is not something I often got to do when I was helping Patrick direct the excavations a few years ago. And guess what - when you move a lot of dirt you find a lot of stuff!

Quite literally, I found a very nice artifact on only my second trowel scrape of my first morning. At first glance it looked like a ground slate point, but upon further inspection I could see that it was not sharp, nor was it ever meant to be sharp - it was made to be blunt. Patrick suggested a "boot creaser" or something of the sort. I think that's a good explanation; the Alutiiq were certainly making a lot of clothing and other things from animal skins.

Blunt ground slate artifact - boot creaser?? (photo courtesy of Patrick)

Huge and fancy ground slate point (not found by me!)

Ground slate point with a groove down the middle (photo courtesy of Patrick)

This years' excavation is at the Kashevaroff Site where Ryan conducted a ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey in 2013. He noticed a slight depression in this area, surveyed it with the GPR, and came to the conclusion that there was some sort of archaeological pit below the surface - maybe a house pit? Catherine is supervising the excavation in this part of the site this year and while they still have a lot of dirt to move, it does look like there is a large pit, but it is not a house pit. It is full of charcoal and fire cracked rock and is something we've been calling "smoke processing pits." It appears to have been filled in by a volcanic ash deposited around 3800 years ago.

One of the more familiar aspects of digging at Community Archaeology was that it was HOT. We were all sweltering in our units, even though I was in thin pants and a t-shirt. It is always amazing that it can feel so unbearably warm when the official temperature is 62 degrees Farenheit, but I swear to you, the hottest I have ever been is while digging in Women's Bay. It's not like I've never been or worked in actual hot weather (I spent an entire summer working in CA where the temperature never dropped below 96 degrees during the day). I have no explanation except that the airport's weather station thermometer must be perpetually broken.

Wool Dogs

"A Woman Weaving a Blanket" Songhees/Saanich (Central Coast Salish), by Paul Kane 1846-1859 from the Royal Ontario Museum

Some Northwest Coast Native Americans who lived in the area around Puget Sound had two types of dogs when Europeans arrived - village dogs and wool dogs. From what I understand, village dogs were just basically regular pets. Wool dogs on the other hand were bred for their hair which was made into all sorts of woven goods.

Wool dogs were carefully kept in pens away from the village dogs so they would not interbreed. Once trade with Europeans/Euro-Americans became widespread in the 19th century, people had access to all sorts of other materials for making textiles and use of dog wool declined. Combined with the depopulation due to introduced diseases, most villages stopped keeping their wool dogs separate from other dogs. The wool dog was basically bred out and/or extinct by about 1850.

I've always thought this sort of dog husbandry was very cool, but didn't know a whole lot about it. This quarter I'm teaching a class on the archaeology of the Northwest Coast and some of the readings have mentioned wool dogs. My students were fascinated by them and dug up all sorts of information about them on the internet.

There are no photos of wool dogs, but the painting above gives us a pretty good idea of what they looked like. I have to say, they're pretty adorable. Check out this link for a larger image of the painting above.

Another structure at the Amak Site

Leslie digging the edge of the charred surface

Ashleigh excavating the charred surface

A chunk of charred grass

We did find part of a small structure in a corner of our excavation this year that might possibly be a house or something of the sort. When the structure was build, people dug a hole for it that extended about 10cm into the glacial till. It had stacked sod walls and possibly a sod roof. We found a surface full of charred vegetation at the bottom - the remains of what we think was the roof. Basically, the sod that covered the structure burned and collapsed, so charred grass was left sitting right on the floor.

We took samples of the charcoal and will send it off for radiocarbon dating. I'm excited to find out how old this structure is because I think it's older than the majority of the site - older than 5500 years old.

In the rest of our excavation we have not found evidence of houses per se, more just evidence of temporary camps. This structure however, might actually be a house. We definitely still think this was primarily a seal hunting camp, but it's possible that at some point people actually lived here for a while and built a little house.

Amak Excavation Conclusions

A hearth

Final shot of the excavation showing the hearths

Jenny and Ryan digging in buggy conditions

Jenny's sideblade

Last Wednesday we finished our excavation and on Thursday it was all backfilled. We opened a huge area this year and moved a massive amount of dirt. Despite finding some very confusing deposits and features, we did figure a lot of it out and were able to answer our research questions fairly thoroughly.

We found good support for our hypothesis that this was a seal hunting camp. We found MANY more bayonets (ground slate spear points) and a few chipped stone points - all of which would have been used for hunting. It still amazes me how many bayonets were in this site. It was not unusual for us to have a day where four, five, or even six bayonets were found (that is very unusual at any other site Patrick or I have dug at). We still not not find any evidence of real houses, also leading us to believe it was more of a temporary camp than a village.

Our second main research goal was to figure out why people in Ocean Bay II times (~5500 years ago)  moved so much dirt. I'm not exactly sure we answered that question in regards to what they were doing in the area we excavated last year, but I think we've done a good job figuring out what they were doing where we excavated this year.

We found what we consider to be a large structure where people had hearths and were cooking or smoking seal meat. It looks like they dug down into the sediment at the site (both volcanic tephra like the orangish ones you see on the left side of the excavation) and the glacial till (sediment that was left behind when the glaciers receded from this valley ~12,000 years ago). In the first photo above you can see five depressions with rocks in the bottom of the excavation - those are all hearths. They are sitting on glacial till that has been sort of cleared off by people - when the people dug into it, they removed the larger rocks to make a smoothe-ish surface. We also found three post holes near the hearths. We think they posts held up hides and perhaps a think layer of dirt and sod was piled up against the back (that later collapsed and we had to dig through it to get to the glacial till). We think people were smoking something here because we found lots of black dirt full of charcoal and fire cracked rock. We assume it was seal meat because other evidence from the site points to seal hunting. Features like this full of charcoal and fire cracked rock are very common in more recent sites (after ~4000 years ago) where people were smoking fish, but this seems to be the oldest feature of this type excavated on Kodiak.

Mapping features in the excavation before backfilling

Andrea and I drawing a profile

After we finished the excavation we had quite a bit of mapping and profiling to do before we could backfill. In the second photo, Andrea is measuring the depth below the surface of a deposit while I draw the profile in the notebook. These profiles help us figure out and record the relationship between different layers at the site. We "shoot" the elevation of the surface of our excavation from a transit (set on our site datum) and then we measure the depth of each level below the surface. We then know the depth of each level below our site datum.

We had an amazing crew for backfilling - especially since most of these people weren't getting paid! Most of them are either volunteers (including Ryan and John) or students. Even Patrick's kids, Nora and Stuey, came out to help (they really enjoyed carrying half-full buckets, although Stuey carried a couple of full ones!). With so many hands, we were done by 3:00.

There is more we learned in our last week that I want to write about, but I'll wait for another day. The internet has been too slow to upload photos at my parents' house, so I'll have to post on days I come into town.

A hard working backfilling crew!

The backfilling crew, minus Jill who had to go into the museum after lunch

Stuey and Nora inspecting our backfilling job

Amak Excavation Update

Andrea holding a battered bayonet

Leslie with a pit feature that was dug into glacial till

Libby volunteering at the site for a day

Tatiana holding another battered bayonet

Jenny holding a bayonet for the DIY camera crew

Week three has continued with a bit of every kind of weather. Our 1 1/2 days in the lab while it was raining allowed us to get caught up on washing and cataloging artifacts though. Today the sun came out and it was hot again.

In our main excavation we are continuing to removed deposits that we believe date to the Ocean Bay II time period (~5500 yrs ago). Unfortunately these layers are confusing the heck out of us (that's not really such a bad thing as it always makes it interesting!). We are finding large areas where there is stacked sod (old volcanic tephras) and large areas where there is lots of black sediment, charcoal, rocks, and "electric orange" tephra - tephra that looks like it has been fired. In many places, the black layer is right on top of glacial till. In other places there is sterile volcanic ash right on top of till, which is what you should find in places where people (or other things) have not disturbed the soil.

Even though we are pretty confused, Patrick and I do feel like we are figuring the stratigraphy out. We are even starting to form some hypotheses for why people were doing the things they did at the Amak Site.

We think that when people came to this site to hunt seals in Ocean Bay II times, they dug up all the dirt in one area of the hill and piled it up in another area. Then they used that cleared area for burning - for some type of burning that created lots of charcoal and used lots of rocks - maybe cooking or smoking seal meat? Even if we don't figure out exactly why they created all these features and moved all this dirt, I think it's still valuable that we are identifying and describing it. It is rare to find features such as this in sites this old on Kodiak and we hope that what we've found might help us or someone else figure out the purpose of similar features at other sites.

Today was also a fun day because we had a few visitors. Libby, a former Alutiiq Museum staff member, volunteered this morning. It was fun to hang out with Libby because she helped run Community Archaeology back when I started as a student intern in 2002. We also had a film crew from the DIY network who were here doing a show on building a lodge and wanted to add a historical piece. If you happen to see us on DIY, look for me screening in the background!

Week 2 of excavations at Amak

Christy's bayonet

Claire's three bayonet bases

A chipped stone point I found on Wednesday

We had another week of amazing weather and beautiful artifacts at the Amak Site. It was buggy on a couple of days, but we can't complain! We continue to find lots of ground slate bayonets. I think the only day this week we didn't find at least one was the day a reporter from the Kodiak Daily Mirror showed up! On Thursday one volunteer found THREE bayonets in her square and another found two - more in one day than we have found at other sites of the same age in the entire excavation! And just to top that we found six yesterday, but I was so jaded I didn't even take pictures of them; I just wanted to keep digging. We've also found a few chipped stone points recently, made of chert, as well as pumice abraders (for straightening spear shafts), and whetstones (for sharpening bayonets).

The deposits at this site have been fairly confusing (at least to us!) but in the last three days we have started to feel like we understand what people were doing here. In the photos below you can see streaks and blobs of different colored dirt. These are bits of old volcanic tephras that have been moved around by people. In most of our excavation last year we did not find these tephras at all - meaning people had removed them. What we now believe is that where we excavated last year, people dug up the dirt ~5000 years ago and stacked up blocks of dirt with sod and vegetation on top. Now we are digging through those stacked sods.Take a look at the last photo of the sod wall we built when we opened up our excavation. Now imagine that wall after thousands of years - all compacted and melted together - it should look like the pattern we are finding now in our excavation. But we don't really know why people were digging up sod and stacking it. Usually Alutiiq people built their houses with sod, but we haven not found any good evidence of houses at this site. Hopefully digging a little deeper will help us figure this one out.

Remnants of stacked sod

Our sod walls

The eDig

Ashleigh holding a bayonet fragment

Jill digging a pit as the interns/field school students and Patrick take notes

Public outreach has always been a huge part of Community Archaeology (the name says it all) but this year we have moved to a whole new level - posting things online while we're digging! Patrick told me before we started this year that Amy (the Deputy Director of the Alutiiq Museum) wanted a photo from the dig every day to post on the museum's facebook page. I originally thought that in the evening Patrick or I would email her a photo. However, on the first morning of our excavation, as I watched Patrick describing the site to the students, it occurred to me that I could take a photo with my iPhone and email it to Amy!

We started just after 9 AM last Monday, and by 10:00 this photo was on the Alutiiq Museum's Facebook page. It's been fun to see our posts online so quickly and see the comments. It is also amazing how quickly technology changes. Last year I don't think this would even have been possible - the cell phone reception at the site wasn't as good and Kodiak did not yet have 3G. It would have been extremely slow, if not impossible, to email a photo from the site. This year it's so good that I've even been able to email some videos from my iPhone to Amy.

In other news, we continue to find bayonets and still think it looks like a seal hunting site. We are still removing Level 2A (~5000 years old) and uncovering whatever is underneath. This next level is confusing, and might even include a house, but I will refrain from writing more about the stratigraphy until I have some idea what's going on!

Community Archaeology Week 1

Ashleigh studiously taking notes at lunch time

Andrea holding a toy bayonet

Tatiana with two pieces of a bayonet that refit

Caitlin and a bayonet tip

We have finished the first week of our excavation. We had amazing weather and we know full-well that we have had more than our fair share of good luck on that front.

On Wednesday we finished removing what we call Level 2 - a 3800 year old volcanic tephra containing very little cultural material (re: no artifacts). It was a slow day for those who had their hopes up after finding quite a few cool things on Tuesday. Today did not disappoint though. With L2 gone, we were able to start digging in Level 2A - a mixed up deposit consisting of bits of older volcanic tephras, gravel, pebbles, glacial till, and cultural material such as charcoal and artifacts. This level is from the Ocean Bay II time period (~5000 years old). This is the level in which we found most of our bayonets and other ground slate tools last year. In this excavation it appears to be the same.

Tatiana started off the morning with the base of a bayonet. Just a few minutes later John found the tip of the same bayonet just a few feet away. It is pretty cool to find two pieces of a tool that broke 5000 years ago and put them back together. And as if refitting one point wasn't enough for one day, Ashleigh later found two pieces of a rather large bayonet that refit as well. Caitlin was stoked to find her first bayonet.

You might be wondering, do we find anything besides bayonets??? Well, not really. There were a couple worked pieces of red chert (a point base and a side blade), a couple of red chert flakes, a single basalt flake, and a pumice abrader. That was about it for today. The artifact assemblage is still supporting our hypothesis that this was a seal hunting camp.

In one of these photos you can see Andrea holding a toy bayonet found a couple of days ago. We believe that this is a toy based on the way it was manufactured. Someone took great care in making the base and even serrated the edges. The body of the point however isn't even ground - it's just shaped. This is nothing like the other beautifully ground bayonets we find. Children are often invisible (or ignored) in the archaeological record, so it is exciting to find something that strongly suggests that at least one child played at this site.

If you want to follow our finds in near real-time, check out the Alutiiq Museum's facebook page (thanks to the iPhone, we are able to email photos and video to Amy who posts them on the facebook page throughout the day).

Tiffany, Andrea, and Caitlin digging through 5000 year old deposits (L2A)

Jill excavating a pile of hearth debris