Jeff Rasic from the National Park Service, along with Rebekah DeAngelo from Yale and her grad student Brooke Luokkala are in town to do some work, along with Laura Crawford, at the Birnirk National Historic Landmark site, which is on UIC lands (and yes, the actual name of the place is Piġniq, but the site has been written about as Birnirk, so I’m using that name for the site). Becky and Brooke got in Sunday, after travel from the east coast, and Jeff got in yesterday. However, the weather was pretty bad, so we postponed real fieldwork until today.
I did see them in the field briefly yesterday. I had to take a quick trip to the point to check on something for UIC Lands. On the way back, I met them near the Birnirk site, unfortunately a bit stuck in gravel. They were successfully extracted and continued their tour of Barrow.
Today we went out to Birnirk. We looked at all the mounds, Jeff got GPS points on mounds and other reference points, and Laura did quite a bit of coring. I flagged the perimeter of a “box” that we hope to have some of Craig Tweedie’s crew do detailed DGPS measurements on. That data can be used to make a contour map of the site, which can then be compared to the map James Ford made in the early 1950s, when he was there with Carter. It should be interesting to see how much sea level has changed. It clearly has risen since the earliest houses were occupied, and even since the early aerial photos, but the question is, how much?
Out of Ice and Time 
I visited the mounds in 1967 during the summer. They were totally surrounded by swampy tundra. The mounds were dry but it was a wet walk to get up on the mounds. They were called “duck camp” locally and the various mounds were used to shoot eider ducks that passed over the spit in huge numbers.