Friday we got the gravel moved. If you remember, the site looked like this:
Gravel pile on the Ipiutak structure
Not exactly conducive to a quick recovery excavation, especially since it’s mostly going to be volunteer labor, the students being back at school and all. It had been looking pretty grim on the heavy equipment front, but Ilisaġvik College came through with a reasonable rental on their new Case loader, and Walter Brower & I headed out around 9AM.
Getting there took a while, but shortly after 10 we were at work. The loader has extra wide tires, and reputedly is not very good in snow, but it did fine in the gravel.
Starting work
Backdragging.
Backdragging proved effective and minimized the need to drive on top of the feature. We were able to take it down to less than 1 foot above the surface, so it will be a lot less work this week & next weekend.
Finishing touches.Walter checking the results.Final result--a great improvement.
All in all, a great improvement.
The next day Barrow played Nikiski in football. Both schools are in the Greatland Conference, and Nikiski is a perennial football powerhouse. Barrow had never beaten them.
Cathy Parker FieldFootball beside the Arctic Ocean. Whalers #24 (in motion to the left of the frame) is Trace Hudson, who works on the Nuvuk Project when he's not playing football.
Barrow fixed that.
Final score. No, I have no idea why there is 3:24 on the clock; the game was over.
We had a really great finish to the official field season. We excavated a last burial which turned out to be that of a very muscular person, who seems to have been buried in or on bird skin (maybe a bird parka). A possible burial (a human bone showed up in a test pit) turned out to be an isolated find, so we don’t have an unexcavated burial undone. There was a complete egg in the dark organic soil by the bone, which looks like something a fox might do to hide a stolen egg, so maybe the fox brought the bone there from somewhere else. The DWF continued to have a number of interesting artifacts (nice lithics, ground slate, composite labret). I’ll try to get pictures up in the next few days.
We were able to backfill all the big holes, record all surface finds, cover the DWF in hopes of being able to come back later this year, and still get the students home at a reasonable hour.
Some of us are going out again in the morning with an NSF-funded Mexican/North Slope student exchange group of about 25 or so. We’ve worked with them before, but not after the season ends, so it’s a bit challenging to find something to teach them that doesn’t risk disturbing something we haven’t got the time or crew to deal with.
I only got 4 hours of sleep last night, so off to bed.
The weather was not pleasant. It rained all day, and was pretty cold. My fingers are swollen up like sausages. The rain also took out the track pad on the computer for the transit, so we couldn’t back up the files in the field. We were able to use a mouse in the lab, and got the files backed up and transferred to the other laptop, so if the track pad doesn’t perk up, we’re OK. My Nikon Coolpix S9100, which I just got last night to replace one that failed after a week, died the same way today. Nikon won’t issue a refund for 15 days, which is truly ridiculous under the circumstances. I’ve been committed to Nikon, loved all the SLRs I’ve had (FM, 4 FEs, 4 N70s, D200) and liked everything about this camera, too, except it won’t work. Epic fail. So don’t buy one!
On the plus side, the very deep burial turned out to be a person wearing a fur parka and wrapped in hide! You can even see traces of the stitching. We aren’t sure how well-preserved the person is (we found a few finger bones and a nail inside the cuff). We decided to take it out en bloc (complete) and take it back to the lab to excavate in controlled conditions so we can document the garment better, since it is very fragile. We had some plywood brought out and managed to slide it through the gravel under the entire burial and lift the whole thing. This required the digging of a very large hole, which we’ll now need to backfill. Many thanks to Brower Frantz and his crew for bringing out the plywood and transporting the individual back to the lab while we kept on in the field.
Right arm and side of the fur parka, lying on a hide.Close-up of stitching on parka
The DWF keeps yielding more artifacts, some of which are quite nice. We’re trying to get to a reasonable stopping point and figure out a way to protect the exposed feature in case we can get funds to work on it in September.
We started investigating the last GPR hit and came down on a jumble of wood. The excavators were not optimistic, but I kept pushing to go a little further. Eventually, this appeared:
Feature detected with GPR
The feature (I’m not calling it a burial until there is evidence of human remains) was jumbled because at some time after it was constructed, someone dug a hole in the middle of it. And right beside where the hole had punched into the feature was this:
Antler arrowpoint
The hole just missed it.
The DWF (Ipiutak) levels had their own surprises. We found a good bit of fish bone, some lithics (nothing diagnostic) and a lot of broken bone, but the really cool thing, which I found on the edge of the hearth, was a flattened but apparently complete egg!
I went out to Nuvuk today. The purpose of the trip was to accompany Hank Statscewich from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who needs to pick out a new site for an experimental current radar. They have run it near NARL for a year, with no problems, so they want to try it further out-of-town. Since there is a good bit of archaeology out at the tip of Point Barrow, the idea was that I could help him find a spot that was not likely to have any archaeology. We’ll still test before anything gets put out there, but still.
It was a sunny day, but there was a good East wind off the ice. We were heading into it, more or less, going probably 25-30 mph until we got off the road, and the ATVs from BASC didn’t have windshields on them yet (they take them off when storing them so they can fit more vehicles into a smaller space). That bit was not fun.
The first place we went was on the younger, more western of the two prominent beach ridges, near a weird concrete and steel device that reportedly was brought over from Prudhoe Bay during the gray whale rescue. It seemed like a good possibility, so we took GPS readings. It looks like there has been a good bit of er
Looking at the ice on the Beaufort Sea, I was happy to see it was really flat for quite a way out. That will make it easy for bear guards to spot bears there, if only it will stay that way.
Flat ice on the Beaufort Sea, at the farthest north point in the US.
We looked over toward the ridge with the Nuvuk site on it. I was very discouraging about it as a site for the radar, but Hank was curious, and enough snow had melted so we could get there without bogging down (ATVs aren’t so great in snow), so we headed on over. There was some sort of rack that was new since fall, so I wanted to look at that.
Looking SE toward the Nuvuk site.
While we were over at the site, I double-checked how far we had tested in relation to the telephone pole with a light on it, since there is interest in mounting something on that pole, and access will be an issue until we are sure there are no graves right around the base. We mark the end of the tested area with a line of driftwood, which we move inland at the end of every field season. It’s only a few meters from the pole, so we should be able to clear that one way or another this summer.
Looking toward the Beaufort from the middle of the site. The line of driftwood on the ground marks the limit of the tested area.
The “rack” turned out to be a table-like construction which was labeled as a survey marker for North Slope Borough Wildlife Department. I checked with them when they got in, and the survey is due to be completed in four days, so it won’t be a problem for us. I took a picture of Hank on his ATV while we were there. Actually, I took several with his camera too, but the image never looked in focus to me, so I took some with my camera just to make sure.
Hank S. at Nuvuk
We stopped at another spot that was also a possible radar site. Hank will take the GPSs back and do calculations to determine which one would work best for the radar, and then let me know and we’ll test it as part of determining if it can go out there.
The ride back was great, since the wind was at our backs. Alas, my face is covered with what look like hives, which is what happens when I windburn
We had a serious amount of snow last winter, although I’m not sure if it was an all-time record or not. By a couple of weeks ago I was beginning to get a bit worried. We’ve started work at Nuvuk in June some years ago, but it was pretty miserable. We’re starting in early July this year, but at the rate the snow was melting it was looking as if we might still have snow patches on the ground when we started.
However, we’ve had some warm sunny weather the last couple of weeks, and the snow is melting. Patches of tundra are starting to show through; people are heading inland after geese. We drove out to the end of the road to take a look at Point Barrow. I was happy to see lots of gravel showing. Once the gravel starts to appear, it absorbs lots of heat, and the snow melts faster. Given another month, we should be in good shape.
Point Barrow seen from the end of the road.
It was misty when we drove out, but I think it was a mist from snow ablating (going from solid to vapor directly). It happens here a lot on warm days, resulting in mist rising from the ground as well as from puddles & ponds.
The fun with radiocarbon dates continues. I did manage to get a proposal off to a client, make some preparations for the summer field season and take care of the usual admin sorts of things. Otherwise, I was working on the C14 dates.
It was slow going, in part because I read French much more slowly than I do English, and I was working my way through the Blumer compendium of St. Lawrence dates, which requires looking in at least 3 places to figure out how to evaluate the dates. In some cases, one also has to go to other books to look at what the original excavator recorded (or didn’t). Thank goodness for the American Museum of Natural History and their very nice downloadable PDFs (although the link seems troubled at the moment) of their Anthropological Papers. I had a couple of them on my hard drive, which saved me a trip to get the actual books.
Anyway, St. Lawrence is going to be quite a mess. There are a lot of whale and walrus dates, and Dumond has calculated a correction for them by paired dating with terrestrial plants. The only problem is that the whales in St. Lawrence are the same stock as the whales they catch here, and whalebone C14 doesn’t turn over very fast (a couple of decades at least) so they average the ∂C13 over that period. That means that the correction factor for those whales should be the same anywhere in their range. We’ve worked on it here for the Nuvuk graves, and the correction factor that works is much smaller. I’m guessing walrus ingest relatively huge amounts of old carbon and skewed the calculations…
There was a very nice evening sky on the way home.
Sky from NARL. It was actually brighter, but this exposure shows the colors best.
Out of Ice and Time 