So today is my birthday…

And it’s been great so far! The weather has been gorgeous, not too cold or windy. The light this morning was amazing, golden reflecting off the clouds & snow. Unfortunately no pictures from when it was best because I was trying to get stuff done before I start a series of back-to-back trips, although I did look out the window a lot when I was making phone calls. I did get some a bit later, and it is still pretty great.

Last year I got to finish unwrapping the child on my birthday. This year was not nearly as exciting, but then archaeology really isn’t like Indiana Jones… much. I finished and sent the quarterly report to the client on our activities supporting the ARM site. It is good to look back and see what has been done, and I’m using a format that asks for lessons learned, so it forces one to think and track, which is not a bad thing and easy to skip when things get busy.

I made the final corrections on the encyclopedia entry on frozen sites, and am just waiting for one image to upload it to the publisher. The Point Hope chapter is being read (quickly, I hope) by a couple of friends, and then will get sent to the editors for review. I still need to recalibrate C14 dates for Northern Archaic and Palearctic, but that can get added to the final.

One of the things I’m involved in as part of the GHEA/Long-Term Sustainability RCN is a workshop on the Kurils & Aleutian Islands. I’m a participant, not a discussant, which is a bit odd since I’ve never stepped foot in either one of them, or even worked on a collection from either area. The workshop involves putting up some articles and a conference paper ahead of time, and some on-line discussion, in hopes that we will all be up to speed by the time we get to Seattle, and can hit the ground running. I got put in a group looking at Ecological Dynamics and Paleoecological Histories, which is very cool. I definitely have some catching up in the literature to do here, so I spent a chunk of the afternoon downloading the various papers & such folks in my group (and others) had put up. I have put them into my Dropbox and synced my iPad, so I can read them while traveling. It turns out I am not the only one who doesn’t have a conference paper done, and some of those that are there are not that formal :-).

I also need to find a way to get a paper I wrote on bearded seals in Greenland up. I don’t have an electronic copy, but it seems pertinent. One topic that seems to be coming up is possible sea ice extension into the region and folks seem to be making a few unwarranted assumptions about how species that are not now present in the area behave. That would of course skew any climatic interpretations one might be trying to derive from faunal data. I think the bearded seal paper covers that and provides a good example of some issues that are counter-intuitive.
And Barrow caught their final whale of the 2012 season! Hey hey hey Anagi Crew!

Shortly after I got home there was a know at the door & flowers & balloons arrived! That was quite the surprise, since Glenn had already bought me a huge arrangement of flowers (and a Kindle Paperwhite, which is supposedly in transit). I unwrapped them, and they turned out to be from the entire staff at UICS (arranged in secret by Tammy). The flower arrangement is gargantuan!

Now I am going to have cake.

Fall storms

I got back to Barrow to find snow on the ground. It hasn’t been that stormy here, but we had a coastal flood warning over the weekend, with part of the road to Nuvuk getting washed out, and waves getting over many of the berms. I am afraid that there may have been significant damage to the site beyond the 20 m we already lost in September. I would like to get out and take a look, maybe even shoot in the bluff, before I go to Valdez & Seattle, but that is not looking too likely.

Apparently, there is a likelihood of a storm surge from the Chukchi and flooding over the next few days, maybe until the 22nd or so. The North Slope Borough is quite worried, and sending out info on emergency kits & so forth. Not a great situation. The house I live in floated in the last really big storm surge event in 1963, and if it does it again, it could wind up in the NARL sewage lagoon. Yuck.

We’ll be prepared, but I don’t think it is that likely to get that bad. However, it most certainly is already damaging Nuvuk more. It has been blowing from the north and winds are picking up. It is a bit depressing given that erosion must nearly have reached the GPR returns that we think are Ipiutak features.

Not much to be done about it, so I just push on with writing proposals & papers. I’m going to a workshop on the Kurils & Aleutians, and am slightly belated working on the conference paper. Just as I got ready to really check out the other papers prior to doing the serious writing (the outline is done), it was discovered the website had lost the last 3 weeks of updates (explains where my stuff went–I thought they were just being slow getting it up), so I couldn’t get into it. I hope we don’t lose Internet later this week, and that I have decent connectivity in Valdez.

How to get writer’s cramp

I’m almost done with the last of the papers I (over)committed to. I am waiting for one reference and the encyclopedia entry on frozen sites will be done. I’ve got a few more references to add and a few more C14 dates to calibrate and the chapter on North Slope archaeology for a Point Hope bioarcheology volume will be ready to go off for review. I have a general NS archeology document that I wrote and update on a regular basis that I use when people ask for background. Because the available information about the published C14 dates from some of the earlier sites is not really sufficient to calibrate them (and the archaeologists haven’t published calibrated dates) I had been using BP (before present–present being 1950) dates in this, but decided that I needed to bite the bullet and get some calibrated dates. Some more recent work has resulted in calibrated dates being available, so I can at least give date ranges for the various cultures in cal years, which should be an improvement.
I started to work on the two NSF proposals that are up next. I am working on both a RAPID and a regular proposal for work on the Ipiutak component at Nuvuk. Unfortunately the NSF Fastlane web site wouldn’t let me see any of the PDFs that it converts things to. I’ll have to take this up with their tech support in the morning.

A visit from the media

The important but not overly exciting routine of proposal preparation & writing on my part, and cataloging on Coby’s part was broken on Friday. KTUU TV, the Anchorage NBS affiliate, sent a crew to Barrow for a few days. They were covering the football team, and wanted to get some practice footage, but that left them with lots of free time, so they had to get as many other stories as possible, and they decided to go for science stories.

I know they did an interview with George Divoky, who had just made it in off Cooper Island (the weather has been really awful–not boating weather at all). They also shot some footage about Nuvuk and coastal erosion.

First they stopped into my lab for an hour or so. They shot a fair bit of footage of Coby Hatcher (who is going to HS on-line and therefore was working in the lab when they were there) doing various things one does in an archaeology lab, including re-bagging cataloged artifacts and entering storage locations for artifacts in the catalog database so they can be found again.

Coby updating storage locations in the catalog

With a big collection, this is pretty important, since otherwise it can be very hard to retrieve things. It actually came up because I was trying to find the bird bone from the Ipiutaq levels that had been used to make needle blanks. A number of folks think it looks like it is an albatross bone, which is interesting if true, since there aren’t many albatross around here. One of them is involved in a project which is doing ancient DNA work, and offered to run some of this bone to see if it really is albatross. There was no storage location in the catalog, so we had to look a bit. We found it and I’ll mail it out, and Coby put updates in the catalog.

Then they shot some footage of me showing some of the artifacts, and some of me doing an interview about the project and what one can learn through archaeology. That lead into what gets lots when sites are lost to coastal erosion and/or warming and permafrost thawing.

Dan Carpenter shooting video. He really liked this fox skull.

Dan Carpenter, KTUU, interviewing me in the lab. Photo by Coby Hatcher.

After that, they headed off to do something else. In the late afternoon, we headed out to Point Barrow for them to get some shots of the site and, as it turned out, coastal erosion in action. That’s a story in itself, so that will be the next post.

Papers and proposals

I’m afraid I’ve been pretty silent here. It was not a case of writer’s block exactly; I was writing quite a lot. It’s just that I had a lot of papers and proposals that were due (or overdue–sorry ’bout that, editor people) and was really trying to get them done. Between feeling guilty about writing anything that wasn’t the late chapters/papers/proposal sections and actually writing some much that my hands were sore and my brain was protesting, something had to give.

At this point, one article is published electronically (unfortunately behind a pay wall :-), there are three chapters of books (one mine, two co-authored with Glenn Sheehan) off for review, I’ve got most of what I need in to the PIs for two proposals due soon, and I’ve just got one chapter and two shortish encyclopedia entries to write and a proposal to rewrite, an abstract to submit for the Society for American Archaeology meetings next spring (in Hawaii, so yes I’m going), and posters (or maybe a talk) for the AGU meeting in San Francisco in December. Oh, and the annual budget process is starting.

Things are pretty quite in the lab with most of the students graduated. There is one home school student who is still working away, since he has more flexible hours. I hope to start getting something done in there myself once the writing frenzy is over.

2000+ miles of outreach–part 1

I’ve been busily writing away at a couple of overdue papers, and the students have been going great guns processing and cataloging artifacts in the lab. While all this work is important, it doesn’t make for the most exciting blog posts, so I’ve been focusing on the papers.

Last week I wound up doing a couple of outreach events. The first was a public talk at the Murie Science and Learning Center at Denali National Park. Since I don’t live anywhere near Denali NP, this was no small undertaking. I flew to Anchorage, rented a car and went to the Apple store to pick up some video adapters for my Mac Air on Sunday, picked up my daughter Justine on Monday morning, and we made some sandwiches and set out. It is a 240 mile (more or less) north out of Anchorage, up the Parks Highway to the Park and the MSLC. I was speaking at 7 PM, but wanted to get there a bit early to make sure I found the place and my computer worked with their projector & so forth.

We had a pretty nice drive. The weather was sunny, but since I was driving north that was no problem. The drive is beautiful, although there were clouds around Denali (the mountain some call Mt. McKinley) so it wasn’t out.We stopped at a couple of viewing areas, but no luck. There are actually mountains between Denali and the Parks Highway, but Denali is so big it would have been visible anyway except for the clouds.

We made good time to Denali. It is very beautiful country, to my way of thinking, and gets prettier as you climb away from sea level and taiga forests with tundra on the mountains. It took a bit of doing to find the MSLC, but we succeeded.

Trip to Denali — Pathway to Murie Science and Learning Center. The white dinosaur footprints lead to the MSLC from the Denali NP Visitors’ Center.

Closer view of MSLC.

We got in touch with NJ Gates, who runs the speakers’ program and she got us settled. I made sure my computer worked with their projector. Although this was not a paying gig, they were kind enough to put us up in a yurt that they have for visiting researchers. Since there weren’t many around, we each got our own room. I had brought down sleeping bags & a Thermarest (since we thought one of us would be sleeping on the floor) from Barrow. The Park has wagons, and we used one to pull our gear to the yurt. I somehow didn’t manage to get a picture of the outside or the bear-proof box into which all food and toiletries went. The interior was divided into 3 rooms, 2 of which shared an entryway. We got those two.

After we got settled, we went to the grill at the visitors’ center for a quick dinner, and headed back to give the talk. We got a decent crowd for a Monday night, I thought. It went well, except for the earthquake in the middle of it. It was big enough to really shake the screen, and given that the MSLC is a heavy timber-frame building, I waited a few seconds to see if it would get bigger. It didn’t, so on we went. Some folks had a lot of questions, but we were all done, and in bed in the yurt by about 9:30.

This was important, because Justine had a doctor’s appointment in Anchorage at 11AM the next day. We got up at 4:15, grabbed a couple of sandwiches & a drink and were on the road a little after 5AM. The weather wants quite as nice, but it didn’t rain until we were nearly to Wasilla (yeah, that Wasilla), but stopped quickly a little later. Still no sight of Denali, but the drive was beautiful.

We made it to the doctor’s office around 10AM, I dropped Justine off, met my husband for lunch (he was in Anchorage on his way back from Ketchikan to Barrow), and caught a plane back to Barrow on Tuesday night.

Wednesday, we got ready for a visit by kids from the City of Barrow summer program. More about that in the next post.

Check out my Day of Archaeology Post

I am participating in the Day of Archaeology 2012. The Day of Archaeology consists of blog posts from people who are doing archaeology. The idea is that the posts somehow describe what was happening on July 29, and that together they give a world-wide snapshot of archaeology. Given that people may be in the field or otherwise occupied, new posts can be added until July 9. I got my post about the Nuvuk Archaeology Project up late last night. There were 28 pages and counting when it went up.

So go check it out, and while you are there, check out some of the other posts. There is something for everyone!

A not so quick trip to Nuvuk

I got out to Nuvuk today for the first time today. The ARM project that we support want to put a flux tower at the Point to measure flux off the ocean during the open water season. The thing is that the ideal spot for the tower is on the ridge where the Nuvuk site is.

In the past, other folks wanted to put flux towers there, but there simply wasn’t room for a tower in an area where we had already tested and recovered all the burials, and we didn’t want to chance disturbance to a burial. Now we’ve gotten a good way ahead of the erosion, so it seemed that it might be possible. However, I didn’t want the tower to be on top of the possible Ipiutaq structures, just in case funding for their excavation is available. Since the tower installation involved moving a little gravel, it was important for me to be there just in case something showed up.

It took a while to get out there, since the ARM Kubota is on tracks and can only go about 15 miles an hour. We quickly got a spot picked for the tower. After that, I spent most of my time looking around for bears while the others started putting the tower together. I spotted 2, a mom and a cub, who were heading to the bone pile.

We decided to use sandbags for the guy-wires and then added some more on top the tracks on the base plate. To minimize disturbance to the site, we decided fill the “sand”bags with beach gravel, and bring them up with a four-wheeler.

After the tower was assembled and the instruments were on, the instruments needed to be wired up. That took a while, but I had to sick around since one of them needed to look down are gravel, so we needed to cover the plywood base plate, which meant more digging.

That gave me time to check out the area where we salvaged the Ipiutak structure last fall. Good thing we did that last fall, because that area is gone. There is a big notch in the bluff there, and that’s it. It would have been a pity to lose that, because we found some very interesting things in the field and in the lab.

While I was getting to play, the crew was working away in the lab. They have finished floating and sorting the materials from the fall salvage, and are moving on. Over the winter, we’ve had several sets of visitors on short notice, which required some materials to be cleaned off benches fairly quickly. As a result, there were a lot of miscellaneous boxes around the lab. The crew has reorganized several cabinets and gotten most of the boxes emptied. There is plenty of bench space, so we are moving on to cataloging and marking.

Part of the hard-working lab crew (l. to r. Victoria, Trina & Trace) working on faunal remains.

Sustainability, Ipiutak and Graceland!

I’ve been in Memphis for the 77th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It’s been pretty busy, so I’m having to do a couple of recap posts. WordPress just dumped a post of over 1000 words with no trace, despite lots of prior saving, so this is going to be a 2-parter.

I left Barrow on Monday night, PowerPoints mostly done, and arrived in Memphis early the next evening. I spent the morning putting the final touches on the presentations, and after grabbing a bite to eat, I headed over to the Comfort Inn to the steering committee meeting for the new Long-term Human Ecodynamics RCN of which I am part. Since a number of us haven’t worked together before (RCNs are for building networks, in part), along with the updates on how sessions which had gotten RCN support had gone, the status of some upcoming meetings and budget situation that are usual for such things, a number of us did presentations on what we did/are doing to wind up as participants. The RCN is working on 3 fronts: systematic comparisons of archaeological cases which can be considered as completed “experiments” in long-term human ecodynamics, development of cyberinfrastructure to make such comparisons more feasible, and sustainability education and community involvement.

I’m primarily part of Focus 3. I talked about Nuvuk, and hope I made the points that students are more engaged if they can work on a site which is actually scientifically important rather than one which is of a type that is so well understood that it can be “sacrificed” for training. I also hit the destruction of sites in the North, since that will undercut our ability to do the sort of archaeology necessary to really understand the ecodynamics of a situation well enough to make policy-relevant contributions.

Afterwards, we adjourned to Papa Pia’s for pizzas & more discussion. The pizzas were good, although I generally don’t expect eight (!) slices in a personal pizza.

The next day was a long one. The Arctic/Subarctic session started at 8AM. The room was rather noisy, with a pile driver working outside that was literally shaking the building! Despite that, there were some interesting papers. Bryan Wygal led off with a paper on the Nenana and Denali complexes (stone tool groups in Alaska). Nenana, which is earlier, does not have microblades and Denali does. There are various theories about this, including climate change. I don’t think Bryan had a final answer, but he did have some data to bear on the question. He was followed by Risa Carlson talking about some recently discovered early sites in the Alexander Archipelago in SE Alaska. There were very few early sites found until geologists figured out that the continental glaciers had actually pushed the land on the unglaciated edge like the islands up (called a “forebulge”), so that old shorelines were at a different elevation (taking into account the forebulge relaxing and sea level changes) than people had thought. With the new model, archaeologists have been finding old sites. Then Leslie Howse talked about the archaeofaunas (animal bones) from two sites on Grinnell Peninsula in the Eastern Arctic. One is a site from the Late Dorset culture and the other is an Early Thule site. They are very close to each other in both time and space, so she was investigating if the known differences in technology (the Dorset didn’t have bows, floats, whaling gear or dog teams, for starters) and probably in social organization were reflected in the animals they were catching. Indeed, that seems to be the case.

I followed with my paper on Ipiutak hearths. I talked about the hearths at the type site, which are often described as being annular (like a bull’s-eye). I believe that the testing technique in use, which consisted of people digging in the middle of any depression suspected of being an Ipiutak house, resulted in the hearths having their tops cut off by the time the archaeologists got there to draw them, leaving a bull’s-eye effect instead of a mound. I also talked about the box hearth at Nuvuk.

After that, we moved to the Aleutians, with Caroline Funk giving a paper on bird use on the Rat Islands. The Rats got their name from rats introduce from ships, which pretty much wiped out the birds. They have been eradicated, and biologists would like species lists of what was there. She was pointing out that cultural factors are involved in bird use, and that they must be considered in interpretation. She is still working on this, but is finding references including symbolic and spiritual uses, as well as the obvious uses for food and raw material. Diane Hanson gave a nice talk about an upland house on Adak that her crew excavated. It was interesting, not the least because the received wisdom is that there were no inland sites in the Aleutians. They were trying to identify activity areas in the house, but unfortunately this particular house seems to have been abandoned on purpose, so it had been cleaned very carefully. However, it did have some neat floor and chimney features similar to those seen at Amaknak Bridge and Margaret Bay. Roberta Gordaoff gave a talk comparing lithic (stone) tools from upland and coastal sites on Adak. After that Joseph Wilson talked about advanced archery technology (mostly Athabaskan) from an ethnohistorical perspective, and Tiffany Curtis finished up with a talk on building a dendrochronology (tree-ring dates) for the Forty-Mile River area in Alaska, in part to help data all the prospectors’ cabins there.

After that, we went to Graceland! Matt Betts, Karen Ryan, and several of their Canadian colleagues made the pilgrimage. The last time Matt & I went to a tourist attraction at a conference, it was the Louvre, so from the sublime to the ridiculous perhaps, but still, I was in Memphis, it was close, so I had to go.

Lest you think that this was a frivolous trip, may I point out that Graceland is on the National Register of Historic Places?

I was actually a bit surprised at how big the house wasn’t. It was a nice sizable house, but by no means huge, and Elvis had added on. I’m pretty sure my parents’ house has a bigger living room! The decor was the height of 70s glam.

The living room featured a 15-foot white sofa (reputedly there nearly as long as Elvis was, but one imagines it got re-upholstered occasionally.

It also had peacock stained glass windows framing the doorway to the music room. Those who really liked them could buy copies to install in their own home at one of the gift shops.

The tour not only goes through the house, and the trophy room (which has several rooms of gold records, awards, memorabilia from Elvis’ films, plaques from charities, and fan art, but into the back yard, by the office his dad & staff used to take care of business, through a smokehouse temporarily re-purposed as a shooting range, and over to a racquetball court that has been converted to display things, mostly the Las Vegas period costumes.