Category: Uncategorized

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.

Lady Whalers State Champs! 26-0 Season!

Barrow, like most of Bush Alaska, is wild about basketball.  Kids start Little Dribblers when they are very young, and there are some really good players here.  Our Lady Whalers have been exceptional this year.  They worked really hard, & now they are state champs!  Congratulations, ladies!  Job well done.

With all the travel this spring, I pretty much missed the season, and somebody had to stay home in Barrow during states (seems like half of Barrow is in Anchorage since both boy & girls went to States).

Also, congratulations to Tikiaq (Point Hope) Harpooners for their 2A State Championship.

New Page with Poster on Threats to Polar Archaeological Heritage Up

Just a quick post to let people know about the temporary page with a PDF of our poster from the Alaska Anthropological Association meeting in Fairbanks (see the sidebar to the right under Documents).  I’ve already had a couple requests, so I thought I’d put it up here so folks could see it.

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.

Vacationing is hard work

Not really.  But getting ready to go on vacation is.  We spent two weeks on Oahu over Thanksgiving.  We’d been promising our daughter a trip to Hawaii when she finished high school, and this was it.  Since the budget process at UIC was in full swing in November, that meant that everything had to be done before I left, not to mention all the usual packing and getting the house ready for a prolonged absence issues.

We got back (with the whole unpacking/laundry extravaganza that meant), only to leave in a week for upstate New York to visit my family for the Christmas/New Year’s holidays.  That brought its own flurry of baking stollen to give in Barrow before I left, packing, Christmas shopping, etc.  There was also the travel to arrange for the conferences in Europe that Glenn & I are going to in January, which is almost done.

All this by way of explaining the lack of posts for the last little while.  I was on the computer so much for all of the above (except the baking, laundry & packing) that I really couldn’t face more screen time, even if there had been spare minutes.

Now we’re here after a 20+ hour trip fortunately unaffected by the bad weather happening across much of the country, so I should have a bit more time to write.