Category: Arctic

Public Meetings & Archaeology

For the 2nd Tuesday evening in a row, I was at a public meeting being held by a NSB Assistant Borough Attorney, who is working on the monumental task of revising Titles 18 and 19 of the North Slope Borough Municipal Code.  These Titles deal with permitting and land use, including issues affecting cultural resources.  She’s certainly trying to do a good job, and the people who came had good input.  Unfortunately, it’s been pretty nice weather both nights, so turnout was light.

Since I’m one of maybe 3 archaeologists resident in Barrow, and the others were otherwise occupied (well, I did bring Glenn along this evening), it seemed like it was pretty much my duty as a concerned citizen to go and make sure the attorney is aware of issues that she might not have thought of.   Many more meetings in all the villages and more drafts and Planning Commission and then NSB Assembly need to pass it before anything really comes out of it, but at least there is some progress.  I certainly hope so, since otherwise I might have finished a piece of needlepoint I’ve been working on for 6 months.  Maybe tomorrow…

Choosing the crew

A big part of the past couple weeks has involved choosing the crew for work at Nuvuk.  There are two funding sources for this project.  One is a grant to the North Slope Borough from the Department of Education, through the Education through Cultural and Historical Organizations program (ECHO), and the other is a regular research grant from the Arctic Social Sciences program of the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation.

The ECHO funds are targeted at K-12 education, so they need to be used for pre-college students and those who teach/supervise them.  We’ve been focusing on high school students for those slots.  For one thing, we run the dig for these students as a job.  That way, even if they don’t find their life’s work in archaeology, they’ll have some spending money for the next school year, and will have learned about interviews, resumes, time-sheets, paychecks and good work habits before they are out on their own.  Students who are less than 15 are very restricted in the hours they can work, even in the summer.  The first year, we hired a couple of students that young, only to find that every time we needed to stay late in the field (usually because something exciting was happening) we’d have to send them home or violate child labor laws.  Essentially, they got punished for being young, which was really no fun for anyone :-(.  After that, we only hired students who were older, and could work some OT, so they wouldn’t need to go home just when things got really exciting.

We’ve been doing interviews with students who haven’t worked before, both to assess motivation and to make sure they understand what they are getting into.  It’s really cold at Nuvuk, even compared to Barrow, and the wind comes right off the ice.  With the field season so short, and the erosion ongoing, we don’t take many weather days.

We’ve also been seeing who is returning, and for how much of the season they are available.  Many of the high school students who want to work at Nuvuk are active in many things, including sports (with summer camps), band, Mayor’s Youth Advisory Council, Model UN, and Rural Alaska Honors Institute.  Most of these involve some travel, so scheduling is complex.  We need to have a good-size crew, but not more than we have 4-wheelers for (allowing for a couple of folks in the lab or sick).  I actually do that in MS Project, just so I can get a clear picture and spot pinch-points more easily.

Anyway, we’ve got all the high school students selected, and have notified most of them, except for the ones who are out of town on family vacations.  We’ve also got one person on tap for the NSF-funded crew, but it looks like we might have room for 1-2 more, since the planned GPR component fell through.  Rhett Herman, a geophysicist from Radford U. in Virginia who has worked with us at Nuvuk in the past, was going to do some geophysical prospecting for burials, which would save us much time & effort.  He had hoped to run a field school, but funding was not available for this summer, so a couple of interested students were going to come up as participants in the dig and help with the GPR on the side.  Rhett’s wife has come down with some unexplained health problems, and he obviously doesn’t want to travel so far while they are unresolved. Looks like -2 for the crew.  So I need to see if I can find suitable replacements.

Bedtime Reading

I stayed up way too late last night reading.  It wasn’t a mystery, though, although I do that often enough.  I was finishing a book of articles on how people move into unknown territory, and how such movements that happened in the past (say, the peopling of the Americas or the islands of the Pacific) can be detected by archaeologists.

The topic is pretty important in Arctic archaeology, since during the Pleistocene (the most recent Ice Age) most of the North American Arctic was covered with ice sheets.  Even today, people don’t live on ice sheets, with the exception of science camps at places like Summit, Greenland and the South Pole.  Once the ice started melting, plants, animals, and people gradually moved into those areas.  One of the obvious questions for archaeologists is when and how.

Actually, it looks like it has happened at least twice.  At least two groups of people seem to have spread across the North American Arctic from Alaska (and there may have been a small group earlier).  The second major time it happened is often called the Thule Migration, and it’s when the ancestors of today’s Inuit peoples, who now live everywhere between Western Alaska and Greenland, mostly along the coast, first spread across the entire North American Arctic.  Why they did it when they did is one of the big questions in Arctic archaeology.  The sites that I have been working at lately seem to be possible pieces of the puzzle.

Hello world!

I am an Arctic archaeologist.  Most people I meet are fascinated when they find out what I do, and where I do it.    When they find out I live in Barrow, Alaska, they are even more fascinated (or horrified).  From the questions I tend to get asked, it’s pretty clear that most people haven’t had a chance to learn much about archaeology or the Arctic.

Hence, this blog.  Not everyone can live in or even visit the Arctic, or take part in an archaeological project, but maybe I can take you along in a virtual way.  I’m going to try to let you know what it’s like to do this.  Some posts will be about the really nitty-gritty boring details that have to be taken care of so the fun stuff can happen, some will be about days in the field, and some will be about bigger-picture things.   Archaeology is really fun, and I’d like to share it.  I’ll try to put in pictures so you can see where things are happening.

Questions are great.  The summer is a busy time for archaeologists, especially of the Arctic sort, and some places I work have no real internet access, so there may be some gaps in posting or lags in replying now and again, but I’ll pick up again when I can.