Category: Barrow

Spring comes in a blaze of glory

It’s the first day of Piuraagiaqta today.  It’s Barrow’s Spring Festival.  I was sort of stuck in the office working, but it was a gorgeous sunny day, with ice crystals hanging in the air.   I looked up during the afternoon, to see one of the best ice halo displays I have ever seen. I didn’t have a camera with a wide-angle lens, so I could only get part of it in one shot.

Ice halo over Barrow, showing sun with 22º halo, parhelic circle running through the sundog, and the lower tangent arc on the horizon.
Ice halo, showing sun with 22º halo, a parhelic circle through the parhelion (sundog), and an upper tangent arc.

Then my camera battery died.  I didn’t get a good picture of the outer 46º halo.  The whole display looked a lot like the Parry 1820 display.

But just then, as I was turning to go back inside in disappointment, I heard a snow bunting singing!  I couldn’t see him, but he was there, and so I know spring is too.

Barrow–Anthro 101 comes to life

For a community of 4400 or so souls, perched on the edge of the Arctic Ocean at the very “top of the world” as we like to say (or at least the top of the US), Barrow is astoundingly multi-cultural.  Iñupiaq, as you might expect, and various strands of Euro-American culture, but there are also many residents who originally came from the Philippines, and other Pacific islands.  Then there are members of other Native American groups who often got here by meeting a Barrow person at one of the boarding schools to which the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) used to ship students off for high school (in places like Chemawa, Oregon, or Kansas), marrying them and moving to Barrow.  We not only have four Iñupiat dance groups, but also a Polynesian one.  Pancit shows up at many gatherings.  We have a Mexican restaurant, a Thai restaurant, a sushi bar, two Chinese restaurants (both run by Korean families) and two pizza places, plus Brower’s Cafe, which has a fairly eclectic menu including burgers and Korean food..

In recent weeks, that multicultural aspect of Barrow has meant that one could get more exposure to a variety of cultures than one would in an Anthropology 101 class.  Aside from the Sweden/Denmark/Bavaria travelogue I did as part of the BASC Schoolyard Saturday, there was a presentation on Aspects of Krishna in four styles of four styles of Indian (subcontinental, not American) art given by a whale biologist from the NSB) North Slope Borough) DWM (Department of Wildlife Management), a talk on Papua New Guinea and various tribes given by a pilot for NSB SAR (Search and Rescue) who had spent two years there flying for a missionary group when he was younger, and a talk on the Netherlands, given by a Dutch social anthropology grad student who is in Barrow doing field research.

Yesterday, ConocoPhillips Alaska and Statoil were holding a public meeting in the conference room of the BARC, where my office is.  The folks holding the meeting help with a few things, and came by my office.  Two of the Statoil people were Norwegian, and when they introduced themselves, I automatically introduced myself using the Danish pronunciation of my name.  We chatted a bit with me speaking Danish and them speaking Norwegian.  One of the Barrow people at the meeting had a Norwegian grandfather (I think) and so that was fun.

My “upcoming trip to Fairbanks”–almost ready

As Tripit puts it, I have an “upcoming trip to Fairbanks” for which I very nearly forgot to make travel arrangements.  I remembered last week, and got the travel done, leaving only the paper, the poster, and the proposal I had to get done first.

The poster was finished on Friday, and sent off to Maribeth for final additions and printing.  She had a touch of flu, but has recovered in time to work out the final edits, and will be getting it printed.

I started serious work on the proposal earlier in the week, and got the final numbers on Friday to plug in.  It went off to the contracting officer this morning, and now we will see.  Costs keep going up here in the Bush, and it makes it tough all round.

I have the paper (or the PowerPoint for it) almost done.  I need to get a picture of Herman Ahsoak’s shed where he keeps his whaling gear (not in the house, behind it, just like folks have for centuries), and improve the map of the whaling captain’s work area at the Peat Locus at Nuvuk tomorrow, and then it’ll be ready.

I’m trying to get packed tonight, so I don’t have to rush after work tomorrow.  It looks like a good meeting, although for the second year in a row the Alaska Consortium of Zooarchaeologists (ACZ) workshop and the Alaska Heritage Resource Survey (AHRS) workshop conflict.  This is getting a bit old.  It should be possible to schedule them both during the meeting without conflicting, but that would apparently require some forethought and consideration on the part of those organizing the AHRS meeting.  The ACZ meeting was scheduled way in advance…

Some serious blizzards

For the past week, the weather has been fairly unfortunate here in Barrow.  We had a snow day on Wednesday.  It was a total whiteout,with so much snow blowing around that I could barely see my car out the front door, let alone the
house next door.  The UICS staff discussed it and decided to hold off until after daylight to go to work (so we could at least have a chance to see drifts).  By that time, UIC and everybody else had closed for the day.

View out the front window during Wednesday's blizzard. Notice the snow streaks and the frost flowers.

The weather improved Wednesday night, but no loaders had been heard at NARL by the next morning.  I called into the regular teleconference with one of our clients, and then headed for the BARC.  Good choice.  The drift across the drive was huge.  I headed back to my house for snowshoes.

Fortunately, the ARM project has a telehandler with a bucket.  They also have a contractor who is trying to finish an upgrade to the BARC instrument platform and is a bit behind schedule.  Once the telehandler was dug out and the area around the ARM duplex was clear, Walter brought the telehandler over to the BARC drive.  One and a half hours later, he had a single lane through the drift and place for me to park, so I went in.  Susie, who’s filling in as the UICS temporary admin assistant, came out in a cab.

The wind was already rising and the barometer dropping again.  I went home at for a quick lunch, and there was already a drift at my door.

Drift at the door at lunchtime on Thursday.

The snow was sculpted in very interesting ways, which had gotten more elaborate while the car was out of the way.

Drift at the front of my house, lunchtime on Thursday. The grill is almost completely exposed.

I went back to work, but by 3 PM it was getting really nasty with low visibility.  I told everyone it was time to head home, since the road from NARL was going to get bad (and Susie and I would be spending some time at the BARC with the contractor if we didn’t get out ASAP).  Shortly after that, they closed pretty much everything in town for the day.

We were closed for everything all day today (Friday), too.  I managed to get a few things done and written from home.  We’ve canceled lab for tomorrow, since the loader has only been working enough to get a path for the water and sewer trucks to get the residential huts, and the BARC is undoubtedly behind a huge drift again.  We haven’t actually gotten water or sewer trucks, mind you, but they can at least come tomorrow.

My husband’s weather day was interrupted by the news that something had blown in in the BASC Bldg. 360 server room.  He went over on foot (falling into snowdrifts that he couldn’t see without glasses) and eventually got a repair crew organized to come secure the room so snow didn’t keep blowing in and wreck the servers.  They had to turn off an air conditioner, but that didn’t seem to be a real problem, given all the cold air that was coming in everywhere.

The wind is finally going around to the north, with temperatures dropping, and even a little bit of sunset sky showing!  It’ll be a chore to get to work on Monday, no doubt, but that is the Arctic.  The entire North Slope was under blizzard warning for a couple days.  That was a huge storm, apparently bigger than any they’re recorded for a decade or more.

Now that I’m home…

I was lucky enough to get an upgrade from Alaska Airlines, so at least I wasn’t bent up like a pretzel all the way to Barrow.  They weren’t any too quick about getting the baggage out, and no-one was to be found to issue the Baggage Service Guarantee vouchers after the 20 minutes had passed, so we took my bag when it showed up (after about 1/2 hour) and went home.

Luckily, today was a holiday so I could sleep late.  Once up, there was the usual post-travel laundry pile to start on.  Once that was underway, I had to dig out my car.  There had been a blizzard in Barrow on Friday, which had blown snow into our arctic entryway, among other places.

Snow in the arctic entryway.

It had also blown all over my vehicle, which required significant digging out.  Apparently the blowing or subsequent plowing had somehow packed snow around my left rear mudflap, since that shattered when I pulled out (only went forward) although I didn’t discover that until I got home.

View out the front door, showing snowed-in car, and ivu (ice push) on the beach in the background.

The wind had apparently also caused some pretty significant ice push from the Chukchi Sea onto the beach.  You can see it in the background of the photo above.  The ice is black in places because it was frozen to the bottom.  The ice is very thin for this time of year.  In some places it is probably 20 or more feet tall.

Once I got to work I caught up on emails, drafted a “mission statement” for a working group on coastal erosion I am helping to organize (contact me if you are interested–it’s global, not just Arctic in focus), worked on an encyclopedia article a bit, and took care of things like time-sheet approvals which can be a time suck, but are fairly important (we all like getting paid!).

18th Arctic conference–Part 4 (Day 2-AM)

This penultimate chapter is a bit belated, to say the least, due to holidays, much travel and associated presentations, and proposal preparation.  However, there were some very interesting papers on the final day as well, and I decided I needed to get this written before yet another conference happened.  And I needed a break from final tweaking of the PowerPoint for said conference.

The first paper was by Molly Odell, on economic change at  Mitksqaaq Angayuk between 3400-100BP.  The site, on Kodiak, seems to have had discontinuous occupations from Early Katchemak to the Russian occupation.  Molly focused on the fauna from a midden associated with an Alutiiq house.  The house seemed to have been occupied primarily by men, based on the artifacts.  The midden showed a change from a pre-contact mixed fishery (primarily cod but with significant amounts of salmon and small amounts of other locally available fish) to a fishery focused almost entirely on cod in the historic period.  Molly interprets this as a shift from a winter settlement to a cod-fishing camp, presumably staffed by men.

Jennifer Raff gave a paper on mitochondrial aDNA (ancient DNA) from the Lower Alaska Peninsula & Eastern Aleutians.  This is interesting, as there are disagreements about how/when various cultures in that area appeared, and whether or not they represent in situ (in place) developments or population replacements.  This work may help settle some of those questions.  Not to spoil any surprises, as this paper is being published, but both haplotypes A & D are well represented, and there is B from one site!

Rick Knecht, a fellow Bryn Mawr College PhD, gave a “just out of the field” talk about excavations at Nunalleq, a Yup’ik site in the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta.  The Yup’ik culture is quite well-known ethnographically, but almost no archaeology has been done in the area.  Nunalleq, for which there is a date of 1300BP (not sure if that’s calibrated or what it’s on or associated with) has extraordinary organic preservation at the moment, but is suffering erosion, which is accelerating due to permafrost melting and sea level rise.  The local community actually contacted the archaeologists in concern.  The 2010 season excavated a house, with lots of organic artifacts (rye grass matting, for example) present on the floor.  They think it might have been a men’s house, which are known for the Yup’ik from the ethnographic record, based on the low numbers of women’s artifacts recovered.  There was a burnt side room, with a large number of arrowheads present, which is possibly a result of conflict.  More work is planned.

Chistyann Darwent followed with a report on the 2010 work at Cape Espenberg, a beach ridge complex which is located near Kotzebue in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve.  This project has been doing survey there for a couple of years and has surveyed and mapped extensively, especially the more recent periods.  They have actually been able to excavate several houses (one on each of the 3 Thule-age ridges) to a considerable extent.  One thing they discovered was that the surface mapping did not necessarily give a good picture of what was under the ground in terms of houses, side rooms and so forth.  One of the houses seems to have burned, although why is not yet clear.  They excavated an outdoor ceramic manufacturing area (inadvertently–it looked like part of the house from the surface).  The houses on the oldest and middle Thule ridges had Thule 2 harpoon heads associated with them, suggesting that they were fairly early.  The also found a copper eyed needle, slat armor.  The tunnel floor was lined with baleen.  The youngest house was of a type that was familiar to the project’s elder consultant, who had been in the US Army during the Korean War, since he’d grown up in a similar house.  It had lots of evidence for fishing.  The dates were a bit later than prior testing had led them to expect, the oldest around 1260-1400BP, the middle 1450-1650BP.

Justin Tackney gave a paper on mDNA (mitochondrial DNA) from Nuvuk, as well as presenting the new direct dates that Joan Coltrane has for the human remains. The results show a number of haplogroups hypothesized to be founders to modern Inuit populations all in one area, which is new.  In general, this supports a Thule expansion from North Alaska.

I got the slot before lunch, and gave a paper looking at the material culture of modern Iñupiat whaling.  I am using this as a way to approach what sort of evidence might be expected in archaeological sites of whalers, and where that evidence might be found.  Essentially, the modern case has a number of artifacts that are needed for whaling and nothing else, most of which have pre-contact equivalents.  The interesting thing is that they are generally not stored in the house, which implies that excavations focused on houses may not be able to address presence/absence whaling too well.

Nuvuk Project at Saturday Schoolyard!

I’ve mentioned the Saturday Schoolyard series of talks presented by the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium before.  Tomorrow it’s the Nuvuk Archaeological Project’s turn!  Heather Hopson and Trace Hudson, two of the students working on the project and I are going to be giving the presentation.

If you’re in Barrow, there’s a van leaving the library about 1:15 or so, or you can drive yourself to the BARC at NARL.  The talk starts about 1:30.

If you’re not in Barrow, it will be streamed, technology spirits permitting, starting around 1:30 PM AKDT.  The feed will probably start earlier.  I’ll try to post the URL, but it should be the same as in an earlier post.  They are now archiving the Schoolyard talks as well, and they can be found in iTunes U.

Running to stand still

No, not on a treadmill, although it would be nice to have a bit of free time for that.  Actually, it’s where I’m at with work.  I’ve been thinking about archaeology and ways that it can inform things besides our knowledge of past lifeways.  For the past week or so, I’ve been running into lots of articles, posts, calls for white papers, and so on that connect to that in various ways.  Today I attended a seminar that brought up a number of issues that archaeology could play a part in addressing in a meaningful way.

However, to take these thoughts further means I need a bit of time to think and read, and then try to put thoughts into sensible words that can communicate with a variety of communities.  But the situation at work is still pretty stressful.  My boss has sent her admin assistant to help me out and get cross-trained on our stuff for a week or two.  Jennifer’s doing great, but it’s a really complex job, so she does have to ask me questions (which she does, instead of grinding to a halt, thank goodness) but I don’t actually know the filing system inside out (we’ve found 2 sets of files for some things where we would only expect one, and aren’t sure what the difference is yet) so sometimes it takes some time.

I am at least making progress on the reports, although ArcMap (the GIS program) decided to get weird this afternoon and refuse to import a bunch of STP (shovel test pit) locations I needed to finish a final map for one of the reports.  It should have taken less than half an hour to do the map, but several hours later, no joy.  Tomorrow (fingers crossed here).

I also have to finish assembling the PowerPoint for the Saturday Schoolyard talk this Saturday.  Trace sent me his  piece this evening (amazingly, he’d picked the same template & color scheme I was already using for my part, so that bit should be pretty easy.  Heather just found out she isn’t leaving for Fairbanks for the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) meetings until Saturday night, so she’s going to talk too.

Sunday and Monday (which is a holiday in Alaska, so we are off work, theoretically) I am making a quick trip to Anchorage.  Maybe I’ll get a little time to think on the plane…

More Whales! Hey, hey, hey Iceberg 17!

Friday two more whales were taken for Barrow, by Yugu and Arey crews, and another two on Saturday, by Ben Itta’s crew and Herman Ahsoak’s crew.

But the really exciting news comes from Wainwright!  For the first time in many years (Glenn & I both seem to remember hear a story about a fall gray whale from the 1930s), Wainwright, Alaska, took a fall whale!  The successful crew was Iceberg 17.  The news made it to Kaktovik where a North Slope Healthy Communities meeting was going on, and John Hopson Jr., a Wainwright whaling captain, as well as NSB Assemblyman, and a great guy, announced it from the podium.  Bill Hess, who has been taking great photographs of the North Slope for decades, was there, and he took a photo which pretty much sums up what whales mean to people here.  The man in the background is NSB Mayor Edward Itta, also a whaling captain.  Aarigaa Iceberg 17!