Things have been so busy with getting gear for the project ready and a couple of contract projects that I really haven’t had time to get my own stuff packed. I had ordered everything that I can’t get here it Utqiaġvik, but actual packing, not so much. The weather had been beautiful.
Umiaq races just after 7PM on July 3.
We went to the parade, which was quite long, with the usual fire apparatus, SAR, and local businesses, as well as a just married couple, and an entire fleet of cabs.
The parade approachesNSB Search and RescueBarrow Volunteer SAR boatThe newlywedsThe local ATV/snowmacine dealerOne of the fleet of cabsNSB Risk Management’s fancy truckKBRW truck. They managed to broadcast the parade from the truck while in the parade.
I was going to take the whole day off and go to the games, but it kept raining, they moved the contests to Ipalook, and there weren’t nearly as many food booths as usual.
A bit rainy for outdoor fun.
So I decided to pack. My husband, who also has a PhD in anthropology and did field archaeology for many years (he now manages the Community Health Aid program for the North Slope Borough) was available to help, so that was a bonus! We managed to get almost everything, except what I am still using, into two dry bags, a duffle bag and my day pack. That includes all my personal gear (including tent and a very plush sleeping pad due to my twice-fused spine) plus some personally owned electronics we’ll be using, and a couple of extra things in case someone’s gear isn’t quite up to snuff.
We went from this plus……to this…and this.Checklists are key.
The first of the crew members have arrived. The field school starts tomorrow morning. We’re spending the first week in town so we can go over some things inside where it is warm not windy, and the students can experience Nalukataq and the 4th of July games. As it turns out, one of them is from Barrow, so it’s not a new experience, but she’ll get to hang out with her family and do field school, so that’s a good thing.
The other part of this is that I think it is important for students to understand what goes into the logistics of a project, so they will get to help with and learn about that aspect of archaeology. Better than trying to learn on the fly when they are in charge, like some of my friends have had to do!
I spent the day getting the field forms updated and finalized, so we can start printing them on waterproof paper tomorrow. Now to update the lab forms and get the workflow established so we can hand off between crew members as they come and go. Several of them are returners, so they know the routine, but it is always a good thing to have documented.
I added the bit about not writing on the back of the form after having to flip dozens of forms over to scan both sides. Not a good use of time.
It’s been a busy week getting ready for the field, while still keeping up with the usual flow of work. Kaare Erickson was up, and went through the field gear. We went over our lists and are in pretty good shape, although we are going to replace the pump for the water screen since the one we have was anything but trouble free. Kaare went back to Anchorage with a decent shopping list for food & camp supplies, which he’ll bring/send up next week.
The logistics guys started making sure the tents are all located & in good order. One of them might try and head down toward Walakpa over the weekend to see how the travel is. Several days ago someone who travels down that way a lot made it all the way down on an ATV, but the trail wasn’t good and the beach wasn’t clear the whole way. Plus the streams were hight since there was a west wind. It changed this afternoon, and the ice has started really breaking out down at Wainwright and maybe in front of town here too, so maybe the beach or even the ocean will be viable soon. If not, we have requested assistance with transport from NSB Search and Rescue. I know they get a lot of requests, and of course emergencies take priority, but maybe they’ll be able to help us out. Fingers crossed we can get down there somehow without a lot of trouble.
I’ve ordered all my personal supplies and am just hoping they get here before we head to the field. They are on the way, but the post office is woefully understaffed and seems to be taking days to get non-first class mail and package slips into the boxes. Not their fault; they work hard, but there aren’t enough workers to get things done in a timely fashion.
We are getting ready for another season at Walakpa, in which we hope to find out more about the house connected to the tunnel we found, and if it is connected to the two house visible in the erosion face, as well as the house that turned out to be beside the monument that got moved. I’ve been scanning field notes, writing proposals, coordinating travel schedules, replacing camera lenses, rounding up tents, and trying to get a fund set up to accept donations.
We’ve got a volunteer crew lined up, including several folks from last year, including Ben Fitzhugh, Caelie Butler, Glenys Ong Echavarri and Becky DeAngelo. We’re going to be joined for a short while by several other archaeologists and students from Barrow, elsewhere in Alaska, the Lower 48, France and possibly Poland. There is also a small field school run through University of Alaska Fairbanks (which still has room for a couple more people–if you have tried to register & failed, contact me–there was apparently a computer glitch that was blocking people for a while), and some folks who are volunteering in other ways. One of my co-workers can’t get away to go into the field, since summer is the busy season, but is scanning all of last year’s field notebooks.
Getting to the field may be a challenge. The ocean is still ice-covered, and there is still snow and ice on the beach. We just had a pouring rainstorm, with thunder & lightning, so the land trail is probably now really awful.
We were able to run a pair of C14 dates on materials from Deering as part of the WALRUS project. I just got the results back today. I have to share the calibrated dates with the folks in Deering first. They were kind enough to let me include the samples, which were found during the monitoring work we did there late last summer, in the WALRUS studies.
They were found together in a fairly thin organic layer (likely midden) in the wall of one of the trenches. Very little walrus has been found there, so we were lucky.
Samples were from the upper dark layer visible in the trench wall.
I’ve been working on dating the various samples from the WALRUS project. Since walruses are marine mammals, direct C14 dating is problematic. In fact, that is one of the things we are looking at with the project. We ran a number of sample pairs of walrus and terrestrial material and compared the offsets. The bad news, there is not just one offset.
That meant that we couldn’t just use that to correct walrus dates. So, we are reliant on construction of chronologies using the caribou dates we have run, as well as other available dates, to figure out how old the walrus samples are. This is simple when we have a terrestrial sample from the same context. When we don’t we need to see if we have dates from earlier and/or later levels (both is better) which gives us boundaries for the context we are trying to date. To do that, we need to understand how the layers were arranged. I’ve been using
For some sites, we have very little information beyond the mound or midden square from which the samples came, or the depth of the arbitrary level they were excavated from. For others, we have more detailed stratigraphic information. I’ve been developing schematic descriptions of stratigraphy for the sites from which we have samples , using the Harris Matrix as a means of representation. Some of these are relatively easy to do and others are more complex. For simplicity’s sake I have only been including sampled contexts in the Harris matrices, although someday I can add other excavated units. The one on the left below is from a site where we have little information on most mounds (we have samples from six), and those we do have info on were apparently dug in arbitrary levels, as far as can be told from the field notes. The one on the right shows the two sampled mounds from a site where I have extremely detailed provenience information.
These help me check that the dates we have are consistent with the stratigraphy, and are helpful in construction of more complex dating models in OxCal. The process helps me think about how the models should be built, and also serves as a bit of a check, since having a crude model with some dates makes it easier to spot cases where a complex model may have been specified incorrectly (and therefore is giving incorrect results).
The trip to the conferences went well. I really didn’t have much time at SAAs to even see friends, if they weren’t in one of the sessions I was involved in. Then it was off to Prague for a session at Arctic Science Summit Week. It was a great session, although we were put into a tiny room, which the participants in the session nearly filled, so a lot of non-archaeologists wound up peeking in and moving on. Peter Jordan who got me involved in the session, and Sean Desjardins, are guest editors for a special issue of Quaternary International which will publish papers from this and a previous session. I seem to have promised them two!
I didn’t have very long in Prague, but did get a chance to catch up with Vica Lozinschi, a former BASC intern who helped with some salvage at Nuvuk. She is married and living in Prague now. We only had a morning, but she took me to see some of the sights (some literally “see” from afar since I had a lunch meeting afterwards!).
One of Prague’s many bridgesStreet performer in PragueStreet food in PragueVica sampling an adult beverage which the Czech people claim to have invented.Me also sampling said adult beverage. My grandfather owned a brewery, so it is of more than passing interest.
Once I got back from Prague I have been writing proposal language, and papers almost non-stop. For some reason, most of the handbook/encyclopedia type volumes I have contributions in are doing new editions this year, which means the articles have to be revised and updated. Several other articles have reached the proofs stage and need to be gone through.
Then there is a dissertation committee I am on. That meant I spent last weekend reading the dissertation, and am now trying to find a time when the entire committee can meet (several of us on Skype) to discuss. I am also working on final radiocarbon calibration and modeling for the WALRUS project, with a deadline due to one of the students having a presentation at the end of the month in which he wants to use my results. There were a few problems with the master database, now resolved. I’ve got all the dates calibrated, haveHarris Matrices built for all but two of the sites, and am using them to check my radiocarbon modeling against. I’ve spent all day today and will spend part of tomorrow on a site with a big wiggle in the calibration curve that pretty much seems to fall right at the period of occupation, so that’s annoying.
I’m also trying to pull the Walakpa salvage project together. This is a site with a deep history that was used up until very recently, and is still visited regularly by folks from Utqiaġvik. It would be a real shame if the structures we found last year just eroded, and at the rate things are going, normal funding channels simply are not fast enough.
This has all kept me pretty busy, and last week I had dental surgery. I was supposed to get an implanted post that a crown would go on after it healed, but apparently my bone hadn’t grown into the socket in a way to suit the dentist. So he routed a bunch of it out (hate that crunching sound in your head) and did a bone graft, so now I have to wait four months and maybe then get the implant. Sigh.
I’m in Vancouver for the Society for American Archaeology’s 82nd Annual Meeting. I’ve got a schedule that is looking pretty insane. I’m giving a paper (tomorrow morning at 8:15 in a session on When Disaster Strike, organized by Heather Thakar), co-chairing a session on Arctic and Subarctic Coasts that Chris Wolff & I put together (tomorrow night at 6PM) and being a discussant along with Alice Kelley in the Burning Libraries session that Tom McGovern organized on Friday afternoon. I’ve also got a committee meeting (CCSAR) after that. Yikes!
I’m also supposed to meet up with several different folks to discuss things we are writing or planning to write, and have a few papers in other sessions that I hope to get to listen to as well. Not to mention, I’ve got friends here that I need to catch up with!
I have to finalize the RRN in the next couple of days. If you have something you’d like in there, pleas get it to me properly formatted (including C14 dates, tables, etc.). We want to include δ13C for radiocarbon dates if it’s available. More information is here.
Out of Ice and Time 