It was Piuraagiaqta this past weekend. Piuraagiaqta is the Spring Festival. It usually winds up getting cold that weekend, but this year it was not bad at all.
Friday and Friday night were very windy. It was so bad that the Snowbird Cleaning folks got stuck at the BARC and had to be pulled out. We were going to have lab, but the combination of the blocked drive (which meant that we’d have to park and climb over the drift) and an afternoon hockey game for some of the students meant that there really wasn’t enough time to make it worthwhile. I did go over for a while, and it turned out to be a good thing, because Josh (one of the UICS ARM techs) got a little too far into the drive when he came over to check the radar, and I had to help him get out.
We went to the parade. It started with Miss Teen Top of the World and a color guard.
There were vehicles and floats from many organizations. They were all tossing candy, which kids and grown-ups alike gathered up.
NSB vehicles. Miranda Rexford-Brown picking up candy.
Vernon Rexford and his family had a bunch of beautiful Malemutes in the parade. There were 9, I think, all walking on leashes and wagging their tails. It was up to about 14F and by the time they got to us, they all had their tongues out.
Vernon Rexford and one of the Malemutes.
On Saturday afternoon, I got to some of the games. There were tea making races,
a race with sleds (crews have to pull a sled to a pile of gear, load and secure it, and run it back) and a new event which was a race where the participants bounced along on the big floats used for whaling.
There’s a horrible bug going around Barrow right now. My husband got it, so we stayed home Sunday, which gave me a chance to do some work on he presentation for the SAAs. Josh drove the Kubota on tracks to the BARC on Sunday.
Wednesday was a fun and productive day. There is a group of middle-school students from a Fairbanks charter school who are in Barrow for about a week on a class trip. (I think the best we got in middle school was a one (loooong) day bus trip to New York City). They are going to all sorts of places in the community, including my lab & the ARM site. They came over to the BARC, and I gave them an archaeological tour of Barrow via PowerPoint, since some of the sites are hard to get to in the winter and don’t look like much right now if you do get there. I also spent a bit of time on the various ways sites are endangered in Alaska (erosion, permafrost melting, etc.) and why that matters. They asked a lot of good questions. Some of them (maybe all) have been helping in the archaeological collections at the UAF Museum of the North, so they had a bit of background.
Half of the students from Fairbanks in the lab looking at artifacts.
After that, we split them into two groups. Half of them went out to the ARM site, where Mark Ivey of Sandia National Labs & Jimmy & Josh Ivanoff gave them a tour, while the other half came to the lab, and then the groups switched. Since we’re working on weekends, there are samples in various stages of processing, so I was able to show them the process we are using on the Ipiutak floor samples from this fall. Then we looked at the Ipiutak sled runners, which I’d shown in situ (in place in the ground) in the PowerPoint. After that, we looked at the items from the Nuvuk-01 hunter’s tool kit. As usual, the little owl fastener was the star :-).
The little owl toggle from the Nuvuk-01 tool kit.
In the afternoon, I got two contract reports in for last year, and moved on to calibrating radiocarbon dates for the big project I’ve been doing. I’m using CALIB, since it reportedly may be a bit more accurate, but it’s output format means that you can’t just cut and paste columns. The only way to keep track was to do about 30 at a time. I got several hundred done, and finally gave up when it simply kept ignoring two dates. I couldn’t see any problem with the input formating, but it just didn’t make any output. Oh well, there is tomorrow.
Actually, there wasn’t, since I was home with a fever and sore throat. We have a half-day holiday for Barrow employees for Piuraagiaqta (Spring Festival), which starts today and runs all weekend. I’m actually taking the time off, since the Internet at the office is sketchy at the moment. There is a switchover from one connection to the earth station to another in progress, and it is not going as well as hoped.
I haven’t been posting much lately. Not that I haven’t been writing a lot, but it’s all been papers, reviews, more papers, quarterly reports, monthly reports, bi-monthly reports and so forth. I’ve still got a couple of papers to finish, not to mention homework for an on-line course I’m taking, and of course, that wonderful April ritual of taxes. Then there are a paper and a presentation for the SAAs in Memphis.
The most fun things to write are letters of recommendation for students who have worked on the Nuvuk Project. It is really great to see kids graduating and moving on to college, although we do miss them when they move on. I’ve been working on ways to continue the archaeology program after the Nuvuk grants are done.
The sun is up for about 15 hours a day now, and will be up full-time in just over a month. This is a pretty time of year, and I’ve gotten some nice pictures. Here’s one of the conjunction of Venus, the moon and Jupiter.
A couple of days ago, I looked out the window, and noticed frost flowers hanging on the clothesline, swaying in the breeze! I’ve never seen anything like it.
I’ve been working on talks for the session on the Connected Arctic at next week’s Alaska Anthropological Association meeting in Seattle. My family was in Juneau lobbying, so I had some free time. I’m almost done with the one about the trade networks which moved large quantities of oil, blubber & baleen from the coast to be exchanged for caribou & sheep products from the interior. By volume, this greatly exceeded the amount of metal, jade and similar items that also moved through these networks. For some reason, the skin & oil trade has received less attention from archaeologists, although it has been documented ethnographically. In fact, it seems to have been a necessity for sustained interior occupation. I’ve been trying to make a good visual presentation, which takes a bit of doing. I think it should be done tomorrow.
I would have been done earlier if I hadn’t had to spend some time on sorting out some safety issues. The local phone company is installing a microwave link to carry internet for science, and the best spot is on the BARC, apparently on the tower where the radar is. For some reason, they didn’t think the FOUR signs on the locked door to the tower warning of possible radiation hazards and giving the numbers to contact someone who could make sure the radar was disabled before they went up on the tower meant THEM. The locked gate at the bottom of the tower deck stairway didn’t faze them either. Fortunately the radar was off, so no one got hurt. However, the radar can be activated remotely, so going up on the tower, even if you think you saw the radar was off when you went by the controls, is a really STUPID idea. Since they presumably will need to go up there again to finish the setup and for periodic maintenance, it was necessary to impress on them (management, not just the crew) that they need to call and get an OK every time. The excuse was that they’d talked to the building owner (who I’m sure approved putting stuff up there in concept, but never told them it was OK to ignore warning signs while doing it!) If people would just read and think….
I was walking into the BARC (where I have my office and lab) after lunch the other day, when I came upon this scene:
Flags at the BARC
A closer look:
Flags at the BARC II
Who put them there, or why, we do not know. But there they were and are.
Last night, hoarfrost started building up on things. By this afternoon, my car was covered in it. Hoarfrost can be amazing, with long fern-like feathers growing off of surfaces.
Hoarfrost on the mirror.Mirror close-upFrost feathers IFrost feathers II
The best was the spiral effect the frost that grew on the antenna made.
I’ve noticed I’ve been getting more hits on search terms relating to those whales, probably since the movie “Big Miracle” just was released. So, since I’m kinda busy with the Super Bowl, I thought I’d put up a few links to the real story.
1) Bill Hess’s blog, where he is doing a series on the whole event. Bill took what were probably the first professional pictures of the whales, including some may probably recognize. This features a lot of Bill’s really fine photographs.
2) An article in the Fairbanks New-Miner which has interviews with many of the folks in Barrow who were involved in the original event, including biologist Geoff Carroll.
3) An article in the Anchorage Daily News by Richard Mauer, who covered the original story and hauled out his notes to write this one.
Well, I’ve gotten 3 of the six papers off to the editors, either in final form or waiting for review, and the big one on Late Western Thule (I think that’s what I’m calling it, pending any requests from the editors to change it for consistency in the volume) is coming along. Right now it’s way too long, still missing a couple of topics, and in need of serious cutting & some illustrations. So I don’t feel quite so guilty about writing anything not strictly part of the paper.
That was going to be the start of a good (nay, dare I say great) catchup post. However, it has been very cold in Barrow, the rest of the family is in Juneau, and I have been trying not to use too much water because the trucks that bring it and the trucks that haul the sewage don’t work well below -30°F. Alas, apparently I used so little water that the bathroom sink drain froze up (there is sort of a design flaw in the drain & I don’t think they ran the heat trace (heated wires along pipes to keep them from freezing) far enough), although thankfully the tub & toilet still are working. So I think I have to go try to remedy the situation now :-(.
Just a short post, because I’m home celebrating my birthday (mostly by coughing–the cold has moved to my chest).
The child is completely out of the parka and pantaloons (Murdoch’s term), and Shawn was able to examine the remains. No change in the age estimate.
I was able to get some pictures of the boot part of the pantaloons. They look like they may have been made from leg skin (something with shorter finer hair than the main part of a caribou hide), with separate soles.
Sole of the left boot
There was a seam up the middle of the vamp on each boot. The boots seem to have been sewn to the pants, which were of caribou hide.
I just got back from the local library, where I went for a talk by Aviâja Egede Lynge on Mental Decolonization in Greenland. Aviâja is a really great speaker, with a graduate degree in social anthropology, who is working on the process of changing the school system to be truly Greenlandic in nature. If you ever get a chance to hear her talk, take it.
The talk was about the lingering effects of the Danish colonization of Greenland. A benign colonization, perhaps, but that brings its own issues. A very complex problem. Much of it is probably the same in any area that has been colonized, other aspects are perhaps specific to this particular case.
Out of Ice and Time 