It is time to think about submitting contributions for the Recent Research Notes column in the Alaska Journal of Anthropology. Get the word out about a project (maybe find some collaborators), let colleagues know about some interesting little find that isn’t big enough for a full article, keep folks posted on what you are doing. More specifics here. This is not limited to archaeologists, folks!
Category: lab
Back from the field
We got into town late last Thursday. The field season went pretty well, after a slow start due to ice preventing us from getting out. We lost a few days to major storms, but we had a great crew and accomplished a lot.
Breaking camp was a bit of a challenge, since we were down to seven people in the field. The big boat was scheduled to arrive at 9AM, so we broke everything down the day before except for the mess tent and the latrine, plus our sleeping tents. Then we got up at 6 AM and took down all the sleeping tents, and started ferrying gear to the beach with the ATV & trailer.
It turned out the boat ramp wasn’t in the water back in town, so the boat didn’t make it until nearly 1PM, after having to launch into Elson Lagoon and go around Point Barrow. It was a cold morning, and once we had stuff packed, it was hard to stay warm, especially since we’d dressed for hard work and packed up everything else. At one point, several of the crew were napping in a ditch.
The boat had to make two trips, so we sent 3 people up with the first load, and then 3 more with the second. I drove the ATV & Tubby back to town, so I was the last one in. I left before the boat, but Doctor Island is pretty fast, and I was riding into a north wind and kept meeting people and stopping to chat, so they beat me home.
Our first day back was the last day of the UIC Science Fair, and the archaeology lab was featured tour. Also I had a presentation scheduled. Everyone was really tired, but we managed to pull things together for a good tour, and in fact had visitors well past the scheduled end of tours. The presentation was well attended.
As I write this, another early storm with winds from the West is brewing, with predictions of coastal erosion.
All ready
Almost the entire crew has made it out to the site. Some of them went down in the morning and set up a lot of things. Half of them came back and took some more people and gear down, and should be heading back soon.
Meanwhile back in town Katrina Watson got the electronics packed up and into the yellow shed, while I got both lab computers back on the network, connected them to the project dropbox and put all the necessary files on them. I reviewed the workflow with Katrina, who will be cycling in and of town, since she’s from here and her family and kids are here for the summer. That means she can provide a bit of continuity for the lab.
I’m going down in the morning. Since the wind is supposed to stay east for a few days, we hope a boat can go down on Monday and bring most of the rest of the heavy stuff (chairs, wood for tables) and more delicate things (cameras, computers, transit) down.
The crew asked for some board games. I posted on Facebook to see if anyone in town had any they weren’t using anymore, and in about 2 minutes, Doe Doe Edwardsen said she had 5 we could use. She even had them delivered! Quyanaqpak Edwardsen family!
One of our international volunteers is coming a bit later. She is currently working somewhere without internet, so she’s been communicating as she can. When I got her itinerary, it became clear she’s going to have to overnight in Anchorage both ways. Back to Facebook, and within a few minutes archaeologist friends Monty Rogers and Katie Meyers had offered to put her up.
Most of the archaeology crew are volunteers, and others are putting in a lot of volunteer time on top of what is paid. Not everyone can take time and go into the field. But we can’t do it without help, and the people like Doe Doe and Monte chipping in make this salvage possible. The true Alaska spirit. We appreciate every bit of help.
Sorting things
Two more crew members are here, and we’ve been doing lots of sorting. Sorting field equipment, sorting some samples from last year, sorting food. We’ve got one or two more days of sorting and putting away samples, and then we can focus on packing field gear.
Kaare is shopping for the project in Anchorage, but he can’t make it up until after the 4th of July, which is probably about when the freight will get here, so we may be rushing around cooking after that.
#Arctic #Arctic #climate_heritage
People are arriving!
The first of the crew members have arrived. The field school starts tomorrow morning. We’re spending the first week in town so we can go over some things inside where it is warm not windy, and the students can experience Nalukataq and the 4th of July games. As it turns out, one of them is from Barrow, so it’s not a new experience, but she’ll get to hang out with her family and do field school, so that’s a good thing.
The other part of this is that I think it is important for students to understand what goes into the logistics of a project, so they will get to help with and learn about that aspect of archaeology. Better than trying to learn on the fly when they are in charge, like some of my friends have had to do!
I spent the day getting the field forms updated and finalized, so we can start printing them on waterproof paper tomorrow. Now to update the lab forms and get the workflow established so we can hand off between crew members as they come and go. Several of them are returners, so they know the routine, but it is always a good thing to have documented.
I added the bit about not writing on the back of the form after having to flip dozens of forms over to scan both sides. Not a good use of time.
Talking with Teachers
I had a fun morning talking to about 40 elementary school teachers from the North Slope Borough School District. They were having an in-service. The original plan was to take them out to Walakpa by boat, but the weather this weekend features snow, a bit of rain and winds up to 30 mph. So–not boating weather.
Since we knew this a couple of days ago, we were able to get the lab ready for visitors. We (Ashtyn & I) put out several drawers with some of the more interesting artifacts from Walakpa and Nuvuk. I put together a slide show to give them an idea about the project, which we showed before they visit d the lab. I also talked a bit about the history of science in Barrow, and the building of the BARC.
A number of the teachers are interested in bringing their classes out to the lab. A few of them are also interesting in volunteering, either in the lab or as photographers. And I think I probably sold a bunch of the Barrow Science hoodies, given how many people asked how they could buy one :-).
Back in town
We made it back into town just over two weeks ago. The field season went well, despite a few challenges from sea ice, snow drifts on the beach and general cold weather. There was a huge amount of catching up to do (nearly 4000 emails), three projects which needed various forms filed, an MOA which had to be done for this project, some radiocarbon calibrations to write up for another project, lots of equipment which needed to be cleaned, dried, put away or returned, and many artifacts and samples which needed processing. Although I had lots of help, I’ve been working 16 hour days since before we went into the field, and something had to give.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have good connectivity in the field, so the only updates I could send were from my deLorme InReach. At 160 characters per message, it really isn’t up to blog posts. That means I’m sort of going to have to do some catch-up posts. I head to Deering for a monitoring project on Saturday, and it’s not clear how good the connectivity will be there either, so there may be another gap.
Boxes and Boxes
Tony and I spent the day going through boxes containing animal bones from the 1990s excavations at Pingusugruk. Tony made a list of boxes that contained the sample bags we wanted, which we then had to find in the warehouse.
There were over 300 boxes from that site, so it was a long day. We didn’t have to open all the boxes, thank goodness, but we had to move most of them. I suspect I’ll be sore tomorrow. Not really in full fieldwork shape yet, unfortunately.
Tomorrow, we’ll do a bit of modeling, before Tony leaves on the evening plane.
In Fairbanks, looking for walrus
After a rather long, drawn-out saga, everything is in place and I can draw on funds so I can work on the WALRUS project. The delays have been really frustrating for everyone involved. Once I get the interns on board in Barrow, we’ll get back to going through the faunal material we have there for walrus samples.
We are trying to get samples from a wide range of sites. Since the sampling is destructive, we don’t want to use artifacts if that can be avoided. Ideally we want unmodified walrus parts, bone or tooth, or if we can’t get enough of them, manufacturing discards. As a fallback, we may wind up sampling things like shovels or bola weights, assuming we can get the museum’s permission, since they are common types of artifacts, and not diagnostic (or something that is likely to be displayed). We currently can’t use tusk parts, since there have been no modern studies to compare their chemistry to that of bones and teeth, so interpretation of results would be problematic. (If any carvers would be able to contribute some scraps from tusks along with a sample of bone and/or a tooth from the same animal, it would be a really big help). We are also looking for caribou or some terrestrial plant material from the same place in the site for radiocarbon dating, since marine mammals incorporate old carbon and the dates are hard to interpret.
More recent archaeological projects tend to have excavated faunal material in the same way as everything else, with decent stratigraphic control, and also tend to have brought it back from the field. However, in the early days, that was not often the case. Even if material was brought back, it often wasn’t cataloged in any detail, so reports are almost no help in figuring out if there is any walrus to be had in archaeological collections. A bit of walrus shows up in catalogs, but most of it is in the form of artifacts. A lot of walrus artifacts (particularly bone, since ivory was clearly an item of trade) suggests that the inhabitants of a site were hunting walrus, so the potential for walrus parts to exist in the collection is there.
Many of the classic sites on the coast of Alaska have strong indications that walrus were being caught by the people who lived there, but they were excavated decades ago, and finding suitable samples in the collections was not something that could just be done by getting someone to pull a particular bag or catalog number. It pretty much requires looking through mixed lots of artifacts and bags of bones. So I’m in Fairbanks doing just that.
We are mostly working in the museum, but it is closed on the weekend, so we got permission to bring a collection of faunal material to the PI (Nicole Misarti)’s lab, and we went through it yesterday. It took some doing, but we got though it, and should have plenty of samples. It was an adventure. We had 24 boxes, most of them full of bags like this:
Not all of the bags were correctly labeled, or at least the labels often didn’t specify species, just element, so we had to look.
We found a few other interesting things in the process, including this really large fish bone from Point Hope.
I’m pretty sure it’s some sort of cod (Gadid) but exactly what sort? It’s really big. If I have time, I’ll talk to the curator of fish, but the mission is walrus samples at the moment.
Out of Ice and Time 