One of the things we collected a lot of from the strand lines was a variety of sea creatures. There are a lot of pieces of what we thought (in the field) was gut, which is a useful raw material. Now that we’ve gotten them into the lab, we think most of it is some sort of marine worms. There are also a variety of other small marine creatures (plants or invertebrates–they have lost their orignal colors) and mollusks.
Marine worm? from 300-400 ADAnother sort of sea creatureSome sort of seaweed?Maybe some type of sponge-like creature?
Obviously, I know a lot more about mammal bones & teeth than these things. So we’ve sorted out a bunch, and Claire will take a couple of each type to Fairbanks, along with the shells. With any luck, we can get some IDs. If we’re really lucky, the species in question will turn out to have fairly narrow habitat requirements, and we’ll know something about what the ocean was like near Barrow when the big storm happened between 300 & 400 AD.
If you happen to recognize any of these, please let me know what you think they are. If you know anyone who might be interested in these creatures, send them my way. The “worms” are very well-preserved, and still flexible. It occurs to me that it might be possible to extract DNA from them (and maybe some of the other creatures as well), which would be a pretty rare opportunity.
The processing of the large bulk samples is proceeding. It’s slow going, but we are reducing the overall volume. We have found a few things that are noteworthy.
Claire has found some well-preserved wood that she was able to take samples of for species identification and possible tree-ring dating.
We also found one piece of coal with one flat, highly polished side. The rest of it looks like it broke naturally and got smoothed by being rolled in the water, but the one side looks different. It’s a maybe, but a pretty good one, although we’ll probably never know what it was or was going to be…
There are also a variety of marine worms, shells and what we think are marine plants. I just spoke to a friend of mine, “retired” biologist, Dr. Dave Norton, who used to live in Barrow and is fairly familiar with the contents of modern strand lines here. Claire is going to take the oddities we are sorting out down to Fairbanks (where he lives) tomorrow night, and he will look at the specimens and try to connect with the appropriate curators at the UAF Museum of the North. I’m going to Fairbanks (for shotgun refresher qualifications for a non-archaeology project I manage for Sandia National Labs) the week after next, and will go visiting the curators with him, in hopes of getting good IDs.
One of the great things about doing archaeology in the Arctic is that the preservation can be spectacular. Artifacts often froze the winter after they were abandoned, and only thawed when they were excavated. This means we get to find a lot of the bone, wood ivory and leather items that were undoubtedly part of most precontact people’s tool kits. We don’t have to guess at what people were using or extrapolate from a few stone tools that did manage to be preserved; we can see it firsthand.
This is not always an unmixed blessing. Arctic archaeology sometimes suffers from an embarrassment of riches.
Boxes with wood from the Driftwood Feature (DWF).
In the past, archaeologists generally only saved the artifacts from a site. Animal bones and soil were pretty much ignored, or at best documented in the field (there are a lot of excavated houses in the Arctic where the animal bones are still piled at the edge of the excavation where they were left decades ago). As archaeological science advanced (radiocarbon dating began about 60 years ago) and people began to do more things with faunal (animal) remains and soil samples, people began to collect a lot more, and to bring it back to museums to save, on the assumption that one day someone would be able to do something informative with it. The idea is still a good one in theory, but it is bumping up against various realities. For one thing, in most areas these sorts of things require storage in climate controlled conditions or they will deteriorate and become useless. They are often quite bulky compared to just the artifacts. Most museums simply don’t have any place to put all this stuff! Some of the better-funded places, like the Smithsonian Institution, have built large off-site storage facilities in areas where real estate is a bit less expensive, just to keep all this stuff. But such places require operational funds and new staff, and that costs money too. Most places can’t really afford that. Some institutions have started charging for putting collections there, but there are problems with that as well.
So part of the new reality for archaeology is that we can’t keep everything. The question is how to decide what to keep and what not to keep. In general, the artifacts are kept. No problem there. The issue is how to deal with the other things.
It’s even more complicated for the Nuvuk project. We have had several areas where massive amounts of organic material, with some artifacts and faunal remains mixed in, were encountered. While one might normally choose to excavate this all in the field, in a couple of cases the areas were right at the erosion face, and could literally have vanished overnight. Combine that with a very cold field situation, where mild hypothermia can dull excavators’ thought processes, it didn’t seem like that was the best plan, since it risked data in a variety of ways. I decided to take tightly-provenienced (with very accurate information on where they were from) bulk samples, which can then be processed in the lab, where it is warm and we have good lighting, magnifying lenses and water to wash the dirt and gravel off so we can get a good look at everything. If excavators recognize an artifact in the field, it gets recorded there, but the idea is that we’ll find the less obvious ones in the lab.
Contents of one bucket shot laid out on a tray.A closer look
One of the areas with a massive amount of organic material was what we called the Driftwood Feature. This level is about 1 meter (39 inches) below the Thule graves. It was actually permanently frozen, and therefore everything organic was in great shape. It looks like there was an Ipuitak dwelling (maybe there were more that had already eroded–we don’t know) on a ridge near the ocean. Sometime between 300-400 AD there was a huge storm, which washed all sorts of things (driftwood, bark, marine invertebrates, shellfish, peat, etc.) up onto the beach, all the way up to where the people were living. It left what is called a strand-line. It looks like they either left in a hurry and didn’t come back, or didn’t survive, since a number of artifacts were still there. The strand-line continued along what had been the beach ridge, and we wanted to see if there was any evidence of more human activity besides the one dwelling. Because there was so much wood, and a number of the artifacts at the dwelling had been wood, we had a needle in a haystack problem, with the haystack about to fall into the ocean (which it did the next winter). So we bulk sampled.
Close-up of the Ipiutak layer at DWF. We excavated many square meters of this!
Now we are going through some of the bulk samples. I’ve been very lucky to have Dr. Claire Alix, a French scholar who specializes in Arctic driftwood and its use by humans, involved with the project since the very early days. She was based in Fairbanks, Alaska, for many years, but has recently gotten a teaching and research position at the Sorbonne in Paris. This is wonderful, since Claire is a great person & really deserves it, but it certainly complicates the logistics of her research on this wood!
Dr. Claire Alix in the Nuvuk Lab
Claire arrived on this morning’s plane, and is already hard at work going through samples from 2009 which were excavated after she left the field. She is looking for all worked (altered by people) items, picking out things that we can’t yet identify for further examination, and recording amounts & types of wood, bark, and other identifiable organics. The non-worked identified material is then being lab discarded. I’ve got the computer map up and color-coded so Claire can look at it when she needs to, Laura is unwrapping the samples, and I’ll probably end up doing the data entry in the catalog. She leaves again on Wednesday night, and won’t be back in the US until sometime after January, so we’ve got a lot to do, and not much time to do it.
Claire and Laura hard at work.Lab discards--on closer examination they turned out not to be cultural.
Later this fall we are going to start going through soil samples and so forth. We hope to be able to reduce the volume they take up. Some of that will be done by separating the actual sample material of interest from the gravel matrix. Where that isn’t possible (for example with large logs or whalebone) we will have to sub-sample, retaining only a portion of the total sample volume. Otherwise, we’re going to run out of room.
I’ve heard a number of interesting papers so far. A bunch of them were in a session on digital archaeozoology. I find this interesting in part because I live and work in a remote area with limited research resources on hand, although for the size of the place they are truly exceptional. A number of highlights from the session below:
1) A paper by Matt Law on zooarch on the Internet. He’d done a survey of on-line arch data archives. People often use them heavily, but so far are not good contributors. People still see on-line publication as less prestigious (which is a problem if they are working toward tenure), but most would still be willing to participate if the process were straightforward enough.
2) A paper by Isabelle Baly & others about a big national database (INPN) the French are building of data on plants and animals from archaeological sites. Much of the data they are including comes from salvage and compliance excavations, which often don’t get published. This is a huge amount of work to pull together (especially with the staff of three that they have!), but it lets people do analyses which they could never afford to do otherwise. It seems to be available through a public website, which will let students and members of the public see and use the data themselves, which is pretty cool.
3) A paper by Jill Weber and Evan Malone about a set (30+) of skeletons of equine hybrids between donkey and onager, which are currently a unique sample. These are thought to be the Syrian Royal Ass, the Kunga, which was actually the Animal of the Year in Syria a few years ago. The problem was how to be able to preserve & share these bones, and study them without damage to the originals. Answer–3D laser scanning & “printing” them. 3D printing actually makes a replica of the item, and is very cool technology. Depending on the budget, the replicas can be very good. The scanned models in the computer are actually even better for doing measurements on ( something we do a lot in zooarchaeology) than real bones in some cases.
4) A paper by Katherine Spielmann and Keith Kintigh on the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR). TDAR is a large-scale data archiving and integration tool, developed at Arizona State University. The impetus was that a lot of archaeologists there had data that they were interested in comparing, in order to look at things across a broader area than any of them had studied individually, but were stymied by differences in the way that their data was stored. They are trying to develop an integration tool and data warehouse. I haven’t tried it, but it seems interesting.
5) A paper by Matt Betts, and a number of others about the Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic Project (VZAP) –very cool 3D models of Arctic (and subarctic, since ISU has been working in the Aleutians/Lower Alaska Peninsula area under Herb Maschner for years, and that’s what they see most of) fauna. The bones are accessed through a very neat visual database interface, which lets you look for bones by species or by skeletal element (part of the body), which is the most common way to find things when identifying unknown bones. Often you can see you have a femur (thighbone) for example, but aren’t sure what animal it’s from. The best physical comparative collections of bones actually have a set of femurs you can look at, rather than having to go to a bunch of skeletons and find the femur. I’ve used this one, and it’s handy. As more species get added, it will only become more useful.
… or zooarchaeologists or faunal analysts (people who study animal remains from archaeological sites), in Paris. The trip over was a two-day affair, involving not one, but two red-eyes. We had a good tail wind, so the Salt Lake City flight was about an hour and a half shorter than expected, which made up for a late departure due to bad weather.
The conference is feeding us lunch every day, and it’s pretty impressive for a university cafeteria. One starter, one main course, one cheese, one desert and one drink. The folks I ate with didn’t see it, but there are rumors that wine was available. The coffee breaks have great pastries and fresh fruit.
The opening reception was amazing, and they didn’t run out of food, frequent problem at such events. They held it in the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution (Great Hall of Evolution) of the National Museum of Natural History, which is just amazing. A few pictures from there follow. I took them with my phone, so the quality is not the best.
Skull of Nile crocodileBlue whale skeletonSouthern right whale skeletonArctic or Pacific loon, probably Pacific. They look alike, and the ranges overlap.A small portion of the assembled multitude.
There are also some neat older mounts. The one of the tiger on the elephant is because a French duke was hunting on elephant back in India, and a tiger leaped onto his elephant. He was only saved because she was so heavy she broke the basket he was riding in. She was shot, and that’s the tiger in the mount, which he had made and donated. It didn’t say if it’s the same elephant.
A hippopotamus, closer-up than you'd want to get in real life.Tiger and elephant, with howdah (the basket).
This week, the individuals we excavated this summer saw a dentist. This is not as silly as it may sound.
The various individuals whose burials we excavate at Nuvuk are not kept in a museum somewhere for future study. That is the way things were done in the past, but nowadays that is not acceptable to most descendant communities (people who consider themselves descended from the individuals whose remains are in question). There are laws specifically to protect Native American graves, as well as laws which protect all graves regardless of the ethnic origin of the occupant. This is a good thing, but it does mean that either research has to be completed very quickly, or new ways to save data for future research need to be found.
The current residents of Barrow, some of whom are the children of people who grew up at Nuvuk, generally think people should be left where they were buried, absent a pressing reason to move them. In general, I agree. My primary research interests don’t involve digging up burials, which makes it odd that I’ve been involved in excavating over 70 of them at Nuvuk over the years. The thing is, the point is eroding, and if the graves aren’t excavated and moved, their occupants will wind up in the ocean. So there is an urgent reason to be doing these excavations.
Since they are happening, most folks in Barrow agree that it makes sense to learn as much as we can about the individuals, prior to reburying them in the Barrow cemetery. I’ve mentioned that a rib is saved for aDNA extraction, which takes place in Dennis O’Rourke’s lab at the University of Utah. Everything else happens in Barrow. For a number of years, the Dental Clinic at Samuel Simmonds Memorial Hospital has sent one or more dental externs (dental students who have come to Barrow to get practical experience in the clinic) to work with the Nuvuk Archaeology Project for a day or two at a time. Sometimes they have come to the field with us, but their primary role has been in the lab, where they examined the teeth of the various individuals whose remains we have recovered. In addition to recording the teeth on standard dental charts, including information on disease and anomalies, they have made casts of the teeth, just like the ones dentists make of live patients in their offices. The idea came Amanda Gaynor-Ashley, DDS, until recently head of the dental clinic, who was visiting the lab a few years ago and noticed that some of the skulls had unusual dental patterns that looked just like those she was seeing on patients in the chairs at the clinic. Dentition (shape and arrangement of the teeth) is highly heritable (it runs in families). Since the individuals we were looking at were going to be reburied, Mandy suggested trying to cast their teeth. It worked well, and each since the externs have done it for the individuals excavated that year. Even after they are buried, we will have an accurate representation of their teeth for future researchers.
Casts of upper and lower jaws of 10A927Cast of all that remained of 10A928's tooth rows
Since we started doing this, I stumbled across a mention of a collection of dental casts of living Barrow residents which was made by a researcher in the 1950s. It apparently still exists, so the casts we are making as part of the NAP may well have an important place in a future research project.
Some of the casts from previous years.More of the casts.
Later this week, Shawn Miller, the physical anthropologist from the University of Utah will arrive. We will have to get the casts put away before that to give him maximum space to work.
Since 2004, we have had a primary site datum NUVUK 1, with two others that were used as control points. As the bluff continued to erode, it became clear that we would need to abandon the primary datum, so last year local surveyor Chris Stein set three more datums. This year, the primary datum was no longer a good place to set up, so I switched to setting the total station up at NUVUK 2 (our former primary reference point, and using NUVUK 1 as the reference.
The program we use, called EDM, is a really nice special purpose piece of software, written just for recording archaeological excavations with a total station. It is really configurable and can make major use of menus, which means no typos and a cleaner field catalog down the road. It allows you to set up (once you get the instrument over the datum point and level) by putting a reflector on the reference point (another datum for which you have coordinates, telling the program where the instrument is. It then does the geometry and lets you confirm where the program thinks the instrument is and which way it is facing. With that information and the angle and distance to any other point, the program does the geometry to figure out where the artifact you are recording is in the site grid.
For all this to work, the datums have to be precisely recorded. On July 20th, we actually had to move NUVUK 1. When Chris set it, he’d chosen a high point, with vegetation, as a good stable vantage point. The only problem was that we weren’t sure that it didn’t have a grave under, and the erosion was getting closer. We had to pull it and see, rather than risk loosing a person to the ocean. All the other datums were quite far away (a good thing for control points) so we needed something more convenient to where we were excavating for ease in checking the setup, or restarting after battery issues. I picked a spot below one of the guy wires for the beacon pole, since the wire made it less likely that anyone would disturb it with a vehicle. We made extra sure of our setup, checked it with NUVUK 4, and tried to yank NUVUK 1.
It didn’t want to come out. We tried tapping gently with a mallet. We really didn’t want to be too aggressive, because we weren’t sure if it was in a burial. In the end, we had to excavate shovel test pits all around to loosen it enough to remove. Fortunately, there was no burial.
We put the stake into the chosen new location, and shot it in. For the rest of the season, we checked setups with NUVUK 4 as well as NUVUK 1(A), and it seems to be stable.
While all this was going on, part of the crew was finishing excavation of another burial 10D75. This burial appeared to be quite disturbed at first, but actually was fairly well-preserved except for the top. The rest of the crew was STPing. Rochelle found one burial in an STP, and Trace found another by exposing some aged wood (we call it “burial wood” because the wood in burials just has a certain look to it) while walking. We recorded and back-filled STPs around the two locations so that we could shift windbreaks there the next day.
I mentioned that we started excavating a burial on the 15th of July and didn’t finish until the evening of the 19th, due to some really nasty weather. It was simply too windy to excavate from Thursday afternoon until Monday the 19th after lunch. Rain, sleet, and snow are all bothersome, but can be worked around. Once the wind speeds get over about 30 mph, the chances of small artifacts (or even worse, small skeletal elements) being moved before their position is recorded or even blowing away altogether is real. Wind speeds at Nuvuk are usually 5-10 mph higher than the official NWS measurements in Barrow. Last year we had a Kestrel 4000 portable anemometer on site, but Laura’s dog Sir John Franklin ate it, so we have to estimate a bit.
We started work on the burial, called 10A927 on Wednesday, clearing vegetation and the organic soils covering the actual burial. On the 15th, we began exposing the individual. The skeleton was quite well-preserved. It quickly became apparent from the size of the femur (thighbone) that this had been a very large person. Dennis O’Rourke, the physical anthropologist who has the grant to work on the aDNA from Nuvuk, helps with the excavations each season. He’s pretty tall (I’m guessing maybe 6’4″) and his opinion was that the burial was of someone who was very close to his height. That would pretty much have been a giant at the time of European contact, since the tallest man the Ray expedition’s surgeon George Oldmixon measured in 1882-3 was 5’8 3/4″ tall. There have been several other fairly tall individuals in the ancient graves at Nuvuk, so maybe the average height was depressed at contact because of poor nutrition because Yankee whaling had depleted the whale stocks pretty badly. We were able to get an aDNA sample, which we take as soon as the ribs begin to show. Jenny suits up and excavates and collects a previously unexposed rib. Weather forced us to tarp the burial to protect it until conditions improved.
Wave breaking on the Beaufort beach at Nuvuk as the weather improves.
On Monday the 19th, the weather was pretty bad in the morning, but by lunch time it was improving, so we went out. The passing of the storm had brought the winds around from SW to ENE, so the first order of business was to move the windbreaks on burials 10A927 and 10D75 (which we were excavating simultaneously). We then began excavating. 10A927 turned out to be a very interesting burial. The skeleton was nearly complete and well-preserved, and the positioning and grave structure were pretty typical for Nuvuk. It was very nice to be able to show the students a real-life example.
I can’t show any pictures, as the Barrow Elders do not want them made public, based on past unfortunate experience. I’ll do my best to describe the burial. A shallow pit had been dug in the gravel (it’s pretty hard to dig anything else, even with metal shovels, which they didn’t have back then), and surrounded it with a “frame” of wood and/or whalebone. 10A927 had a nice whale rib at the foot, and wood at the sides and head. The man had been placed on a hide, probably caribou, on his back with his knees bent. His legs were bent a bit more than usual for Nuvuk, with his feet right by nis pelvis, almost as if the grave had been a bit small. Perhaps the grave diggers had made the standard grave and he was a little too tall to fit easily. His face was turned left. His arms were folded over his chest and stomach.
A number of things had been put in the grave with him. We found a number of whalebone bola weights (bolas were used for hunting birds), which may actually have been put in as a complete bola. We also found a lot of the beach cobbles (bigger than the regular gravel and not that common at Nuvuk) that we have come to call “burial rocks” that were placed in some burials. Most interestingly, he had the top of a human skull , which had apparently been placed on his stomach under his hand, since we found finger bones and a bola weight in it. The skull appeared to have been on the surface at one point, as it was lighted in color than the skeleton, but it seems to have been placed in the burial deliberately, not found its way in later. We have had a couple of burials with more than one person in them, and some where a later burial had disturbed an earlier one and ended up with parts of the earlier burial in and around the later one, but nothing like this.
All this was quite complicated to excavate and record. Since the high school students are all minors, and some are only 15, the easiest way to avoid violating any child labor laws is to make sure they don’t work late. So they went back to town with one of the bear guards just before 5pm, and the rest of us (Jenny, Laura, Ron & I) stayed out to finish. It’s kind of unfortunate, since we only work late when something delicate and usually interesting is being excavated, and it seems tough on the students to make them leave just as things get really cool, but since this is a real job for them, we have to be on the safe side and follow all the rules.
We didn’t get done until about 9:15pm. It wasn’t the greatest weather for all this (never got above 36ºF) but at least the wind dropped for the last couple of hours.
10A927 by the blue tarp, as we pack up at 9:20pm for the ride back to NARL after finishing the excavation.
Yesterday the weather was very nice, our first real summer day, just in time for a site visit by a number of Barrow Elders with family ties to Nuvuk. A fine time was had by all.
Today the weather started out even better, if possible. It was sunny, with blue sky and blue ocean, and so little wind that we actually had mosquitos. We finished one of the two burials we were working on around lunch, just as it started to cloud up. The other burial was done around 3 pm, and we started shooting in and backfilling STPs. Both burials were quite interesting,and both had harpoon heads as grave goods, which we haven’t had since the first burial.
Laura and the students went in early, since there really wasn’t enough for everyone to do, and Laura had to catch a plane to California for her sister-in-law’s wedding this weekend. Dennis, Jenny, Ron, Richard the bear guard and I stayed out to finish. We had a slight delay due to transit battery issues, and a dry fine mist rolled in. We managed to shoot in everything, including some delicate surface artifacts from portions of the site we haven’t reached yet, which are being collected to avoid damage from traffic. Ron and Richard even backfilled a lot of the remaining STPs! The students are very lucky…
Tomorrow we’ll have part of the crew in the lab, and the rest will go out to finish backfilling and haul gear back to the road, where they will meet Jenny in the project truck, who will haul the gear back to the lab for cleaning and storage. It’s very satisfying (and quite a relief) to actually have accomplished what I wanted & have all the data collected a day AHEAD!!
Out of Ice and Time 