Tag: Alaska

Occam’s Razor is going to be coming in handy

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.

Wrestling with dating

That’s what I’ve been doing lately.  No, not that kind of dating.  I’ve been wrestling with how old sites are, combined with the catching up after travel and working on taxes and other forms, it’s kept me busy enough that blogging kept coming in second to sleep.

I got started on this because I agreed to write a chapter for a forthcoming handbook of arctic archaeology dealing with Western Thule to Late Precontact in Northern & Western AK.  The northern part was fairly easy, since this is where I have been working for years, and I know the literature inside out, and am responsible for most of the C14 dates in that time frame, as it turns out (a lot of the major sites here were excavated before C14 dating was invented) but I needed to brush up a bit on the more southern parts of the area, I felt.  When I started doing that, I realized that terminology was a bit fuzzy (early investigators tended to think the entire sequence had to be present, and to call things, say, “Birnirk” because they thought there must be Birnirk, rather than because there were any diagnostic (types or designs only found in one culture) Birnirk artifacts at the site.

Then it became clear that people were using some artifact types as “index fossils” without being clear that they were really only in use for a limited time period.  So if they found such an artifact in a feature, they assumed the feature was used at the same time as all other features with that artifact in them.  Fairly recent C14 dating of some such artifacts has shown that some are pretty good to use, and others were being made for hundreds of years, so they aren’t really much help.

There is a pretty good dendrochronological (tree ring) series for the southern part of the area, due to Lou Giddings‘ pioneering work.  This has enabled people to date wood, although in some cases the possibility of wood reuse seems not to have been considered thoroughly, and only one log dated in a feature.  Then artifacts and artifacts assemblages (groups of artifacts often found together) found in that feature have been dated from the dendro date, and similar assemblages have been assumed to be about the same age.

Add the fact that there are a number of beach ridge complexes  in the area (Cape Krusenstern, Cape Espenberg), which develop over time.  Once people figured that out, it was a logical (and frequently correct) assumption that maritime-adapted people would choose to live on the ridge closest to the ocean.  From there, it was only a short step to deciding that all features on a particular ridge were fairly close in age.  In fact, as people have started doing more C!4 dating, and understanding how to interpret the dates better, it’s clear that isn’t the case.

As you can see, it’s not a pretty picture.  Add the tendency of earlier researchers to conflate time periods (as they understood they) with archaeological cultures, and things get really confusing.  Since this is a handbook, which one assumes is meant to be around for a while (although come to think of it, the Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals, in which I have a co-authored article, is in a 2nd edition less than seven years after the original came out), one would like to write an article that will not be rendered obsolete immediately.

So….  I’ve been going through the literature actually looking at the details of dates given for sites, dendro, C14 or otherwise, and am evaluating them on 9 different criteria to try to winnow out dates that are really reliable to base the chronology on.  That doesn’t mean other sites/features won’t be mentioned, but it does mean I’ll avoid putting hard dates on them, or using them as a basis to date yet other sites.

This is not fun.  I just hope it’s productive.

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…

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.

Papers and articles and PowerPoints, oh my…

Despite the fact that I am still in New York on vacation (except for things like on-line payroll and P-card reviewing and approving, which can’t wait), I’m taking a bit a of a break from reading mysteries and eating Christmas goodies to work on several things I have in progress.  I’m not going to be able to finish any of them, since I don’t have any books here for checking references, and most of the images I want to use are in the Aperture vault  on my computer back in Barrow.  However, I can do outlines, and get a fair bit of the text drafted before I get home, at least for some of them.

In order they are: 1) PowerPoint & accompanying paper on Iñupiat and Cold War Science for a conference in Munich, 2) encyclopedia article on Western Thule 1300-1750AD in North & Northwest Alaska (in 7000 words maximum!), 3)PowerPoint on Alaskan archaeological sites and threats to them from climate change as it has been observed to be occurring for a conference in Tromsø, Norway, 4) article I’m working on with Claire Alix and Owen Mason on Ipiutak at Nuvuk, 5)  encyclopedia article on Barrow sites (Nuvuk, Birnirk and Utqiagvik), 6) paper on ethnographic data on storage of whaling gear, and 7) a paper on whaling gear recovered from archaeological sites which are known to have had whaling taking place.

These all have places they are to go, and times they need to be there.  Nothing concentrates the mind like deadlines, except perhaps the threat of execution…

18th Arctic Conference Part 3-Visit to the University Museum

In the afternoon we took a bus in to the University Museum at Penn for a look at the collections.  William Wierzbowski, Associate Keeper of the American Section, has set things up for the visit.  He had gotten a number of items that had been collected by the late Frederica de Laguna, (BMC ’27: founder of the Bryn Mawr College Anthropology Department) in Alaska out and had arranged them as a temporary “ancestor shrine” for us.

Frederica de Laguna "ancestor shrine" with a number of conference attendees. Rick Davis of Bryn Mawr, who was the host, is in the blue sweater at photo center.

It included maps drawn by Freddy, and fragments of Raven’s Tail weaving, a style which had fallen out of use and was recovered from archaeological fragments like these and a few remaining ethnographic samples.

Hand-drawn map of site location.
Fragment of Raven's Tail weaving.

Bill also brought out THE original Clovis Points.  It was really fun to see them “in person” as it were.

Attendees photograph the Clovis points.
Clovis Point with original catalog card.
Close-up of Clovis point.
Close-up of Clovis point.

Finally starting to catch up

I’ve been insanely busy for the last several weeks.  I do now have a temporary admin assistant, Melinda Nayakik, who has been filing up a storm, which has been really helpful to get a handle on the office situation.  Fortunately, Susie Stine, who has tons of accounting experience and has filled in on UIC Science’s accounting side before also became available.  She’s helping Melinda learn the 2 (!) accounting systems and the paper-flow routines.  Susie has also been really  helpful as we work through moving billing to the main accounting folks.  A good thing, too, since I’ve had the first round of corporate budgets and two CRM reports to take care of.

The budget is in the hands of the higher-ups until the next round, although there are a mass of questions flying back and forth as usual.  One of the CRM reports is just waiting for a nicer background for the main map of this season’s work, assuming it is forthcoming soon, and the other has a couple of references that need to be added.

Other than that, the main thing that is urgent is the presentation for the 18th Arctic Conference in Bryn Mawr.  I leave Tuesday night (since it takes a couple of days to get anywhere that is not in Alaska), so it has to be more or less done by then.  I’ve got an outline, but I need to talk to a couple of whaling captain couples to make sure everything is correct, and I’d like some more pictures of current gear.  I was going to work on this today, and maybe go visit some folks, but I somehow wound up with a stomach bug & couldn’t go out.

I’ve been working on the travel for the Christmas holidays (in upstate NY) and one of the two conferences I’m going to early next year.  My husband & I are both giving papers at a conference in Munich in late January.  He’s going to a meeting at Abisko in Sweden in mid-January, and they’re willing to have me come too, so we’re trying to arrange it as one trip.  Less travel time, and it’ll keep the costs reasonable, I hope.  The organizers are reimbursing a good bit of it, but still, no point going crazy.  I’ve got to go to Tromsø in mid-February, so that travel needs to be figured out next.

Glenn & I may be the only folks at these meetings who actually think there’s a lot of daylight.  Nothing like meeting in the far North in the dead of winter:-).

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…