After a day off, we were back in the field today. The GPR hits we tested were mostly concentrations of water, and buried whale bones (not part of graves, unless it was a whale grave). However, we also looked at two other areas that had turned up in the trails on the first day’s walkover. One proved to be nothing but a concentration of refuse. The other wasn’t looking much more promising, with peat and a little wood, but we took it down to expose all the wood, and low and behold, a very large piece of wood indeed, which is a burial cover. We will have to excavate that tomorrow. There will also be a new set of GPR results to test.
The burial cover exposed. That is one piece of wood! The dustpan is covering what may be a bone, so the photo can be used for the public.
There is also some wood exposed on the erosion face at what looks like the Ipiutak level, including something that looks like architecture.
We finished excavation of the primary individual in the burial, and even managed to remove the box for further analysis and sampling in the lab. The second individual whose grave had apparently been disturbed seems to be a secondary burial, since there was a nail under the cranium, although there was a bird blunt among the remains, so… And another very large skeletal element turned up, so there may still be more of the very large man.
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 rearJared pushing the GPR lawnmower in a brief foggy period
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 past week has been crazy. All of the crew except the GPR people and Dennis O’Rourke are here. We’ve gotten all of the training out of the way except for ATV driving. We spent a while on Thursday afternoon as scheduled, but the logistics provider still didn’t have all the ATVs (or even know what they would be) so we weren’t able to make sure everyone knew how to ride what they’d be driving. Since they may be renting a bunch of manual shift models (and a number of people have never driven anything with a manual shift), it seemed safest to let people learn that before taking them off-road, so the start for the field will be delayed :-(.
We have all the gear piled in the Theater, where we’ll be staging, except for the electronics. They are still in the lab, where they are being charged. Laura and a rotating crew person will get them and bring them to the Theater each morning, and return them for recharging at the end of the day. We also have a generator, but we’d really rather not run it.
On Friday, I had to do a survey of a very small area where a surface current radar is being installed on Point Barrow. We went out a while ago and picked some spots, and after calculations back at the lab, Hank Statscewich picked a spot. I was supposed to meet up with the logistics providers out there, to show them where the tent was to go, but alas, something came up. I ran into one of them at the gas station while getting gas for the 4-wheeler (turned out to be more complex than expected because I filled my 5 gallon can only to find out it leaked and had to run next door to the NAPA to buy 2 new 2.5 cans to transfer the gas into), and we arranged to go the next morning. I did the survey and went home. The weather alternated between spooky fog and quite nice.
Foggy day on Point Barrow
The next day I met up with the logistics providers and headed back to the Point for what was supposed to be a 2-hour activity. I was just going to show them where the tents should go and head back in, but it became clear that might not be the best plan. I made it home 7 hours later. The tents are all up and in place. There are a few issues, mostly relating to them not having actually set up the whole tent prior to shipping, but they were going out today to fix most of them, so we hope to find things in working order tomorrow… At least the weather was nice except when it rained a little bit.
Weatherports going up
Since that shot my Saturday, I spent most of yesterday and today finishing various things that clients need before I get out of the field and dealing with various work-related issues. As a result, I missed almost all of the 4th of July festivities. We did get in for the start of the “marathon” in which crew member Emily Button was running, and the Pretty Baby contest, but Glenn hadn’t really dressed for the weather and the wind & drizzle picked up, so we left and I don’t know how either event came out! Maggie Rose Solomon won Miss Top of the World (thanks to DoeDoe for posting that on FB ).
Runners at the ready. Emily is in the red jacket.
All the Pretty BabiesWhen the potato chips aren't enough...
I thought it was bad enough yesterday, when I got in the car to drive to work, looked over and saw this:
But I went to work and went on about the business of getting travel arrangements made for the crew and ordering field supplies and whatnot. It snowed off and on all day, and was so windy that the crew waiting to install a radar on the roof of the BARC had to call off the lift with the crane due to high winds.
Last night the winds were still in the 20+mph range, gusting higher. The surface of the lagoon next to my house, which started to have patches of open water in the warm weather of a couple of weeks ago, were showing some chop, and it was rather grim-looking all around.
Chop on Middle Salt Lagoon
Apparently it kept snowing during the night, because in the morning the TundraGarden looked like this:
New-fallen snow in June
I spent the morning in a training Webinar for the Alaska Heritage Resource Survey (AHRS) remote web access system, and the first part of the afternoon taking some officials from the US Department of the Interior on a tour of Nuvuk (many thanks to Scott Oyagak for driving us in his truck, because the wind was pretty nasty) and the Nuvuk lab. Apparently one of their staffers had been on a site tour I gave in the last couple seasons and really liked it, so they wanted a tour too. They got to see a lot of ice and gravel, the Birnirk National Historic Landmark (NHL), Nuvuk, Plover Point, and get their pictures taken at the Top of the World, but no bears.
I then got to spend the rest of the day dealing with the aftermath of someone having sideswiped the UICS Ranger while it was parked beside the BARC. It was on the passenger side, facing away from the building entrance, and we hadn’t driven it for a couple of days, but there was no dust on the new dent, so it was recent. Looks like someone was backing out of their parking space and hit it. They didn’t bother to leave a note, or call (the truck has decals). Pretty lame. No way they could have done that much damage and not noticed. Fortunately, it seems like they just made a huge dent in the side of the bed, but the door opens fine & it doesn’t seem to have affecting the driving, as far as Tammy could tell on the way to and from the body shop trying to get an estimate.
Almost all of the travel is arranged, and tomorrow I can update the logistics calendar. Just hope it warms up a bit for the fieldwork…
I went out to Nuvuk today. The purpose of the trip was to accompany Hank Statscewich from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who needs to pick out a new site for an experimental current radar. They have run it near NARL for a year, with no problems, so they want to try it further out-of-town. Since there is a good bit of archaeology out at the tip of Point Barrow, the idea was that I could help him find a spot that was not likely to have any archaeology. We’ll still test before anything gets put out there, but still.
It was a sunny day, but there was a good East wind off the ice. We were heading into it, more or less, going probably 25-30 mph until we got off the road, and the ATVs from BASC didn’t have windshields on them yet (they take them off when storing them so they can fit more vehicles into a smaller space). That bit was not fun.
The first place we went was on the younger, more western of the two prominent beach ridges, near a weird concrete and steel device that reportedly was brought over from Prudhoe Bay during the gray whale rescue. It seemed like a good possibility, so we took GPS readings. It looks like there has been a good bit of er
Looking at the ice on the Beaufort Sea, I was happy to see it was really flat for quite a way out. That will make it easy for bear guards to spot bears there, if only it will stay that way.
Flat ice on the Beaufort Sea, at the farthest north point in the US.
We looked over toward the ridge with the Nuvuk site on it. I was very discouraging about it as a site for the radar, but Hank was curious, and enough snow had melted so we could get there without bogging down (ATVs aren’t so great in snow), so we headed on over. There was some sort of rack that was new since fall, so I wanted to look at that.
Looking SE toward the Nuvuk site.
While we were over at the site, I double-checked how far we had tested in relation to the telephone pole with a light on it, since there is interest in mounting something on that pole, and access will be an issue until we are sure there are no graves right around the base. We mark the end of the tested area with a line of driftwood, which we move inland at the end of every field season. It’s only a few meters from the pole, so we should be able to clear that one way or another this summer.
Looking toward the Beaufort from the middle of the site. The line of driftwood on the ground marks the limit of the tested area.
The “rack” turned out to be a table-like construction which was labeled as a survey marker for North Slope Borough Wildlife Department. I checked with them when they got in, and the survey is due to be completed in four days, so it won’t be a problem for us. I took a picture of Hank on his ATV while we were there. Actually, I took several with his camera too, but the image never looked in focus to me, so I took some with my camera just to make sure.
Hank S. at Nuvuk
We stopped at another spot that was also a possible radar site. Hank will take the GPSs back and do calculations to determine which one would work best for the radar, and then let me know and we’ll test it as part of determining if it can go out there.
The ride back was great, since the wind was at our backs. Alas, my face is covered with what look like hives, which is what happens when I windburn
Out of Ice and Time 