Choosing the crew

A big part of the past couple weeks has involved choosing the crew for work at Nuvuk.  There are two funding sources for this project.  One is a grant to the North Slope Borough from the Department of Education, through the Education through Cultural and Historical Organizations program (ECHO), and the other is a regular research grant from the Arctic Social Sciences program of the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation.

The ECHO funds are targeted at K-12 education, so they need to be used for pre-college students and those who teach/supervise them.  We’ve been focusing on high school students for those slots.  For one thing, we run the dig for these students as a job.  That way, even if they don’t find their life’s work in archaeology, they’ll have some spending money for the next school year, and will have learned about interviews, resumes, time-sheets, paychecks and good work habits before they are out on their own.  Students who are less than 15 are very restricted in the hours they can work, even in the summer.  The first year, we hired a couple of students that young, only to find that every time we needed to stay late in the field (usually because something exciting was happening) we’d have to send them home or violate child labor laws.  Essentially, they got punished for being young, which was really no fun for anyone :-(.  After that, we only hired students who were older, and could work some OT, so they wouldn’t need to go home just when things got really exciting.

We’ve been doing interviews with students who haven’t worked before, both to assess motivation and to make sure they understand what they are getting into.  It’s really cold at Nuvuk, even compared to Barrow, and the wind comes right off the ice.  With the field season so short, and the erosion ongoing, we don’t take many weather days.

We’ve also been seeing who is returning, and for how much of the season they are available.  Many of the high school students who want to work at Nuvuk are active in many things, including sports (with summer camps), band, Mayor’s Youth Advisory Council, Model UN, and Rural Alaska Honors Institute.  Most of these involve some travel, so scheduling is complex.  We need to have a good-size crew, but not more than we have 4-wheelers for (allowing for a couple of folks in the lab or sick).  I actually do that in MS Project, just so I can get a clear picture and spot pinch-points more easily.

Anyway, we’ve got all the high school students selected, and have notified most of them, except for the ones who are out of town on family vacations.  We’ve also got one person on tap for the NSF-funded crew, but it looks like we might have room for 1-2 more, since the planned GPR component fell through.  Rhett Herman, a geophysicist from Radford U. in Virginia who has worked with us at Nuvuk in the past, was going to do some geophysical prospecting for burials, which would save us much time & effort.  He had hoped to run a field school, but funding was not available for this summer, so a couple of interested students were going to come up as participants in the dig and help with the GPR on the side.  Rhett’s wife has come down with some unexplained health problems, and he obviously doesn’t want to travel so far while they are unresolved. Looks like -2 for the crew.  So I need to see if I can find suitable replacements.

Care and feeding of the Total Station

You’ve probably seen pictures of archaeological digs with grids made of strings. Much of what we can learn from a site comes not just from what artifacts are found there, but from where particular artifacts are found in relation to each other.  The string grids are there to make it easier to record where each artifact is found (what archaeologists call “provenience”). I rarely use them.

Many years ago, my husband Glenn Sheehan (also an archaeologist) went to a talk at the Engineers’ Club in Philadelphia, where Harold Dibble & Shannon McPherron demonstrated a system to record provenience in 3 dimensions using an electronic total station (used by surveyors) connected to a palmtop computer (back then, an HP 95) to record not only the place each artifact was found, very precisely and with no transcription or data entry errors, but also some information about it. It automatically assigned an individual artifact number. There was even a little thermal printer that made tags to put in the baggie with the artifact! I left determined to get one.

We did, and took the system to places it had never been. Harold and Shannon had developed it for work on French Paleolithic sites, which tend to be very small. We wanted to use it on bigger sites. Fortunately, they kept improving the program, and it’s now really flexible. You can define what data is collected, set up menus, and use it on really huge sites.

Figuring out how to make everything work in the Arctic, where cold kills batteries and you can’t just plug into a wall socket was another adventure. A combination of generators, chargers, adaptors, and gel cell motorcycle batteries solved that problem. I got pretty good at repairing wires on adaptors, since the original stuff couldn’t take cold.  Over the years, the HP95s have been replaced with rugged laptops, and the thermal printers died. We haven’t found a good replacement for printing bag tags, but old-school marking the bags with a Sharpie works fine.

The GTS201D and all its equipment at Nuvuk.

Of course, the whole system depends on the total station. I’ve got 2, a Topcon GTS3B and a Topcon GTS201D, which is supposed to be waterproof. Total stations are surveyors’ instruments, so they are built to be moved around a lot without loosing accuracy, but they do need to be recalibrated on occasion. That time came for the 201D after last season.

Now, the only place in the state of Alaska that this can be done is in Anchorage. The 201D came in a case with really fragile fasteners, which have not held up well, and I haven’t been able to find a replacement, so we actually lash the case closed like a birthday present.   Needless to say, I wasn’t interested in shipping or mailing the total station down to get calibrated. But Laura and her husband Brian were going to Anchorage, and I was going down several weeks later. I called the shop, and they said the work could be done in the time between the trips, so they hand-carried it down and Brian dropped it off. They assured Brian the work would only take a week or so.

I went down for the Alaska Anthropological Association meetings & medical appointments a few weeks later and stopped by to get it, only to find it wasn’t done. What they had forgotten to tell Brian when he dropped it off was that one repair tech was on vacation and the other was out-of-state for two weeks of training, which had backed things up at bit. They couldn’t get it done in time for that trip. A few weeks later, I went to the Society for American Archaeology meetings in St. Louis.  Since you can’t get anywhere in the Lower 48 from Barrow without going through Anchorage, I was able to pick the total station up on the way home!  It’s now safe and sound in the lab, waiting for the fieldwork to start.

Ordering supplies from the Top of the World

The field season will soon be here. For the last couple of months, preparation has been underway.

Laura Thomas, who is the field and lab supervisor for the Nuvuk archaeological Project, has been double-checking the level of various field and lab supplies, and I’ve been ordering them. This is often a bit complicated, since some of the suppliers have never sent anything to Bush Alaska, at least since our last order, from which they don’t seem to have learned much. They either want to ship FedEx or UPS, which tend to be insanely expensive, and quite often are slower than Priority Mail, or they want to use Parcel Post, which can take several months. We try to get all the ordering done well in advance, so that even if my strong suggestions as to practical shipping methods are ignored, we will actually have what we need by the beginning of the field season.

I’m not sure what the deal is with FedEx & UPS. They make you pay way more than in the Lower 48 for Next-Day or Second Day service. It might be worth it if you actually got the service, but the packages are never closer than Anchorage by the “promised” delivery time, and may take a week more to get to Barrow and get delivered, depending on the schedule of the air freight company to which they hand them off. Of course, no refund, since Barrow (and all the rest of Bush Alaska–most of the state) is an exception area. Why they don’t make that clear to shippers beforehand one can only guess.

Anyway, pretty much everything I ordered has finally made it. We’ve got assorted archival-stable plastic zip bags for artifact storage, conservation chemicals of various kinds, Rite-in-the-rain copier paper for field forms by the ream.

Now all we have to do is get things stored and make up the field forms.

Bedtime Reading

I stayed up way too late last night reading.  It wasn’t a mystery, though, although I do that often enough.  I was finishing a book of articles on how people move into unknown territory, and how such movements that happened in the past (say, the peopling of the Americas or the islands of the Pacific) can be detected by archaeologists.

The topic is pretty important in Arctic archaeology, since during the Pleistocene (the most recent Ice Age) most of the North American Arctic was covered with ice sheets.  Even today, people don’t live on ice sheets, with the exception of science camps at places like Summit, Greenland and the South Pole.  Once the ice started melting, plants, animals, and people gradually moved into those areas.  One of the obvious questions for archaeologists is when and how.

Actually, it looks like it has happened at least twice.  At least two groups of people seem to have spread across the North American Arctic from Alaska (and there may have been a small group earlier).  The second major time it happened is often called the Thule Migration, and it’s when the ancestors of today’s Inuit peoples, who now live everywhere between Western Alaska and Greenland, mostly along the coast, first spread across the entire North American Arctic.  Why they did it when they did is one of the big questions in Arctic archaeology.  The sites that I have been working at lately seem to be possible pieces of the puzzle.

Hello world!

I am an Arctic archaeologist.  Most people I meet are fascinated when they find out what I do, and where I do it.    When they find out I live in Barrow, Alaska, they are even more fascinated (or horrified).  From the questions I tend to get asked, it’s pretty clear that most people haven’t had a chance to learn much about archaeology or the Arctic.

Hence, this blog.  Not everyone can live in or even visit the Arctic, or take part in an archaeological project, but maybe I can take you along in a virtual way.  I’m going to try to let you know what it’s like to do this.  Some posts will be about the really nitty-gritty boring details that have to be taken care of so the fun stuff can happen, some will be about days in the field, and some will be about bigger-picture things.   Archaeology is really fun, and I’d like to share it.  I’ll try to put in pictures so you can see where things are happening.

Questions are great.  The summer is a busy time for archaeologists, especially of the Arctic sort, and some places I work have no real internet access, so there may be some gaps in posting or lags in replying now and again, but I’ll pick up again when I can.