Tag: Alaska

Further adventures

I have been majorly busy since the last post.  I had two days to get a RAPID proposal in to NSF for funds to salvage the remaining portion of the Ipiutak structure.

The Ipiutak structure excavation and the sea

I was scheduled to go to Cape Espenberg to take part in a project there under the direction of John Hoffecker of INSTAAR, and had to get on a plane on July 28.   I wasn’t due back in Barrow until August 13th, and NSF had to process all grants before then, so if the proposal didn’t get in then, they wouldn’t be able to get the money out if it was successful.  Since the house could go in a storm, I spent 2 days writing & submitting the proposal, threw my stuff in a dry bag & my day pack and left for Cape Espenberg.

I had a great time there, with interesting archaeology, which will be a post for another day.  From Cape Espenberg, I flew to Kotzebue and then on to Point Hope for the North Slope Borough Elders/Youth Conference.  It was a great conference, and I had a great time, despite finding out that the workshop I thought I was giving was actually a talk to the entire conference (which I had no PowerPoint for).  Another post for another day.  While there, I found out that the RAPID was successful.

I got back to Barrow after some weather and plane repair delays, to find that the surveyors who I was supposed to work with had done their thing and left town.  I’ve been extracting info from them and trying to get that survey set up, since the report needs to get done, the helicopter needs to head south & I have a 4-day  trip to New York State scheduled on the 25th.  Meanwhile, it turns out that most if not all of the heavy equipment in Barrow is either committed to a job or broken, so we’re having trouble getting a bulldozer to move the 100 yards of gravel piled on top of the rest of the Ipiutak structure.

If that’s not enough, a human skull was found in Wainwright by surveyors (actually the same surveyors) who were doing preliminary work for a possible road project.  The client decided that it would be a good idea to get an archaeologist to come down and see if the skull was an isolated find or if there might be more, and give them suggestions for how to proceed with the road design, as well as make sure the proper reports and documentation were done.  I leave for Wainwright tomorrow afternoon, and hope to be back Friday night, weather permitting.

On top of that, there’s a teleconference & a meeting in the morning.  I just finished an interview with Pat Yack of Alaska Public Radio Network (APRN), who won a ticket to anywhere ERA flies and used it to come to Barrow.   It was quite enjoyable, since he’d done some homework, and asked intelligent questions.  Turns out he’s next-door neighbors with Max Brewer, the long-time NARL science director who lived in the house we now live in.  Small world.

Pat Yack, APRN, at work in the Nuvuk lab
Pat Yack, APRN, at work in the Nuvuk lab

The tale of an osteometric board

I recently contributed a post about a field-made osteometric board to ThenDig, a blog about archaeology which has been doing a theme month on tools and archaeology.  There are a number of interesting posts over there, and it’s worth checking out.

Best day yet

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.

What a day!

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.

Artifacts from DWF.

Two neat finds

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!

The remains of the egg

Sunshine & blue skies…

…and a full crew.  We started work on the burial under the plank.  It took quite a while, as the plank was complex to define.  It was all one piece, in some places up to 9 cm thick, and had obviously required a great deal of work and skill to make.  The top surface looked like the outer surface of the tree.  The bottom surface showed evidence of burning, in some areas completely charcoal.  It should be good for C14 dating.

The remains are those of a large male.  Preservation is a bit variable, but it looks like there might be some ribs that could yield aDNA.  In any event, he will be safely out of the trail.

Many on the crew did STPs.  So far nothing has shown up.  It is beginning to look as if there is a gap in the burials (or at least a much thinner distribution).  I’ve begun to wonder if this could be the result of a village move due to erosion, which brought the village close to the cemetery and made them skip a bit of ground to put the new cemetery at a proper distance from their residences.

At least it was a beautiful day.

One turns into three…

It was a great day in the field, with really lovely weather.  Dennis O’Rourke got in last night and joined us, as did Rhett Herman, & his student Jared Palmer with the GPR gear.

Crew members at the start of the day

We started excavation of the burial that had been found in the road.  As with most road burials it has suffered some disturbance.  At first it looked like there was a large man (found part of his pelvis), then a neck vertebra from a small person showed up, then one skull, then another, and then the nasal area from a third (!) person.  We still have more to do tomorrow, so this may change, but at the moment it looks like there may have been two burial side by side, and a third burial was dug across one of them at a later date.

Starting excavation of the burial

The GPR  guys had a good workout.  They had set up the units on carts, which had worked well yesterday on the beach near NARL, but something at Nuvuk must be different, because they described it as being like “pushing a shopping cart in sand.”  Naturally, this meant that they got less done than they had hoped, but they saw some things and will have a plan view in the morning.  I saw them this evening, and they’d already changed the configuration to a dragable sled, which seems like it might make tomorrow better for them.

GPR gear ("Eva") in foreground, with flagged survey grid in rear
Jared pushing the GPR lawnmower in a brief foggy period

First field day!

We headed to the field this morning.  There were a few glitches, as always in Arctic fieldwork, and a few minor issues that could have been avoided with a bit of planning ahead.  The Rule of 6 Ps applies here, as in so much of life.

The first order of business was to get the gear stashed in a suitable fashion.  UMIAQ had come out and put ties on the tents so there was a way to keep the flaps open, and even built some benches out of driftwood, complete with a stump they had set up for a stool in front sort of like a lecture hall.  They told me this evening the stump was meant for me to sit on when addressing the crew (!) but so far it only got used for balancing on one foot on.

Once that was taken care of, the crew got pin flags and set forth to do a surface survey of the area inland of where we left off last summer.  We have done this for seven years now, and we are finding less than we used to in these walkovers, but there is always something that works its way to the surface.  There were a couple of bird blunts, a marble and some other odds & ends that we managed to shoot in with the transit and collect, but the big find, since our goal is in part to keep the former residents of Nuvuk from eroding into the ocean and learn about them at the same time, was the discovery of a grave.  It was in the middle of the trail that people use on that side of Point Barrow, and had clearly been exposed by traffic, which had scattered some parts.  We recorded the scattered elements, and have set up barriers so no one can drive over the person by accident.  Dennis O’Rourke gets here tomorrow, so we will excavate the burial on Thursday, when he can take the aDNA samples.

It was sort of foggy and windy, and really looked like it should be miserable, but it was oddly warm and bright, just really foggy most of the day.  Everyone kept remarking on how weird, but nice, the weather was.  Hoping for more of the same…

The slog continues…

I am still plowing through the literature seeking out information on C14 dates.  Some of it is really hard to come by, with a date attributed to a house but no  information on the sample, either what it was or where it came from.  Then I look at the information on the artifacts from that house, turn to the plates (not naming any names here, but there are multiple offenders) to look at the artifacts, and see that the plates say they are from a house nearby.  Obviously either the text or the plates are wrong (unless they both are, but I’d rather not go there), so now one is left quite unsure of what was really being dated, and what sorts of artifacts were actually associated with that date.  Cross-dating based on artifact assemblages takes another one on the chin.

Another example from today: a date on wood and skin (what kind? caribou, seal, polar bear?) from a burial for which the description seems to indicate that it was only a few baby teeth!  It’s one thing to have typos in a dissertation, but in published books that people are expected to pay money for?  If people don’t read carefully, and compare about three different places in the book at once, it’s all too easy to accept a date at face value and assume that what is said about what it was found with is correct.  Then it gets mentioned elsewhere, and people read it there and pass it on, and so forth.

Such dates do not get high scores for context or association with the event being dated.  Actually they get zeros, since those factors are unknown.

All this in aid of a handbook article (well, two articles, since this C14 stuff should make an article as well).  On the other hand, a number of people say it should be useful.  I’m sure they’re all really glad that I’m doing it and they aren’t.  Can’t say I blame them.