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…
I still don’t have an admin assistant, and I’m getting stretched pretty thin. The other day I had to print some checks, and got interrupted by something else before I got the check stock out of the printer. The first five pages of an interesting white paper by Tom McGovern wound up on check stock. I didn’t even notice until I got home and started to read the thing… So there were some checks to void.
But I did manage to do a good bit of work yesterday on the maps for the ice road corridor for the Barrow Gas field project. Still not report ready, but I was able to talk with the woman who is the main GIS person for the project, and mark up a map so she could constrict the cleared corridor a bit where it got close to some possible hunting stand locations. It’s still plenty wide, although apparently the engineers were worried that if they can’t go exactly there, they’ll have to go through lots of polygonized ground, which is more expensive to build ice roads on. The thing is the well pad the ice road is going to is on polygonized ground, and surrounded by lots more of it, so I don’t think they’re going to avoid much that way. I can always test it next summer if they really want to go just there.
Today I managed to get two different abstracts for talks in, which is pretty amazing. One was for the Saturday Schoolyard talk that Trace Hudson, one of the Barrow HS students from this summer, and I are giving on the 16th (gotta get my part done before then…) and the other was for the 18th Arctic Conference, which is being held at Bryn Mawr College this year. Since I’d been implicated in talking Rick Davis and the BMC Anthro department into hosting this (the fact that I hosted it in Barrow, with 2 HS students for assistance, while writing my dissertation and working full-time so how hard can it be did figure prominently in my arguments), it really was incumbent on me to give a paper. I’m talking about the material culture of modern whaling (the stuff that a whaling captain and his wife and crew members need to have specifically for whaling) and where those things get used and stored.
So folks, especially East Coast Arctic types, the registration/paper/poster deadline is Friday, October 15. So get a move on!
Friday two more whales were taken for Barrow, by Yugu and Arey crews, and another two on Saturday, by Ben Itta’s crew and Herman Ahsoak’s crew.
But the really exciting news comes from Wainwright! For the first time in many years (Glenn & I both seem to remember hear a story about a fall gray whale from the 1930s), Wainwright, Alaska, took a fall whale! The successful crew was Iceberg 17. The news made it to Kaktovik where a North Slope Healthy Communities meeting was going on, and John Hopson Jr., a Wainwright whaling captain, as well as NSB Assemblyman, and a great guy, announced it from the podium. Bill Hess, who has been taking great photographs of the North Slope for decades, was there, and he took a photo which pretty much sums up what whales mean to people here. The man in the background is NSB Mayor Edward Itta, also a whaling captain. Aarigaa Iceberg 17!
The last couple days have been interesting, in the Chinese curse sense of that word. I’ve got two reports that the clients need ASAP. That’s normal for this time of year. Neither is very complicated, and neither project has anything in the way of what they want to do.
It’s the other stuff that’s been a bit over the top. For one thing, my admin assistant is on an extended leave, and getting a temporary replacement is proving hard, so I’m having to try to get her work done too. The person who usually fills in for her had to go out for some medical stuff, and the person who was going to fill in for her had his girlfriend medevaced the evening before he was supposed to start, and the doctors don’t want her flying so close to delivery, so he had to stay with her. Everyone is OK, thank goodness, which is the main thing, but it doesn’t get the office work done.
On top of that, I’ve had 3 abstracts for meeting papers due, only one of which is in yet, travel to arrange for a meeting in Munich (which the organizers want done ASAP so they know how much they’ve got left after paying for a ticket from Barrow to Munich), vacation travel to arrange to Hawaii and upstate New York (which needs to happen ASAP so we can afford the tickets and don’t have to go by way of Phoenix or Atlanta), two separate people who need the list of UIC Science phones & emails (which I update at least monthly, to no effect, since the updates appear to get lost and ancient lists resurface with phones that have been disconnected for two years), a new company budget process, credit cards to reconcile & approve (and a clunky new system to do it with), some checks to print, possibly a proposal to work on with a colleague in the Lower 48, the DMV had apparently lost paperwork regarding insurance on a company truck that was involved in a fender-bender, and a bunch more stuff I’ve forgotten.
You’ll have noticed most of this needs connectivity. Tuesday evening, in the middle of this I got a call from my staff saying the power was messed up in a building that houses the offices of the ARM project. The guys got a small generator to provide clean power to the servers, which needed a midnight refueling and we got the landlord to get the power company, but no luck. The next day they came back out, and decided all power would need to be shut off to change a transformer that feeds all of NARL. This required shutting down all servers, so no connectivity. No email, no Web, no Skype, no VOIP phones. At least the BARC had power from the generator, so I could write.
In the middle of that, a fellow who works with my husband had a propane explosion on his boat while out whaling. Amazingly, the boat did not sink, only one guy had to go to the hospital in an ambulance (although they all got checked out) and everything went about as well as it could have gone. The windows were all blown out, some of the guys had glass embedded in their coats, I’ve heard, but no serious cuts. Pretty much a miracle.
We scrambled around getting our Herman Nelson heater back from a fellow who had borrowed it to deal with the aftermath of a winter house fire, so that we would be able to keep the pipes from freezing if it got really cold. The power came on at the end of the day, only to find out that the ARM building still had bad power, so into a second night of refueling. It proved really complicated to take the servers down, and the guy handling the job is really sick at the moment, so it was decided not to bring them back up until we were sure there wouldn’t be an abrupt power cut. They started this morning, but it took until early afternoon until everything was mostly back to normal. Then the queued email flood began. My husband was on the way to Anchorage this evening, and we had to get BASC checks printed so he could sign them (the other check signers are busy with whaling right now) before he left.
The power guys got the ARM building back on-line in the afternoon, the checks got done, and I actually was able to email some of the stuff people needed to them.
But the best thing was after work, after I dropped Glenn off at the airport, I got to go out to the old NARL runway. Barrow caught three whales today (Savik, Saavgaq and Panigeo crews); one was already butchered when I got there, and many happy people were working on the other two. I talked to Maasak Brower, who had a huge smile on his face, and the first thing he said to me was it was a good day. It’s a fine thing to have a whale give itself and help you feed the community.
Savik whale being butchered.
Maktak and flipper from Savik crew's whale.
Baleen from Savik crew's whale
Mandible (jawbone) of Panigeo crew's whale in foreground. Some of the whale still being butchered is in the upper right, and in the background are some of the shares that will go to many people in the community of Barrow and beyond.
The meat and maktak is distributed according to set rules. Shares go to the captain, to the boat (or its owner, since the boats don’t eat maktak), various crew members, other boats that helped tow the whale in, and to anyone who turned up and helped with the butchering. In turn, those shares will be passed on to family members and friends across the North Slope and Alaska and down to the Lower 48. It takes about 3-4 hours to completely cut up a 30 foot (~10 m) whale, which weighs about 30 tons. Then shares are distributed and people bring them home. There has been a constant stream of vehicles, some with trailers piled with maktak, past my house, coming back from the runway. Guys went out in really small boats on a very cold ocean, about 1000 miles from the nearest Coast Guard help, and had leviathans give themselves to them, and towed them home, and got a lot of food for people, as their ancestors have for many centuries. Tomorrow, weather permitting, people will try again.
Obviously, I think that archaeology is interesting. In my experience, so do most non-archaeologists I meet. People ask lots of questions, and it’s amazing how many of them say they always wanted to be archaeologists (hey, we take volunteers!).
So, I imagine that there’s a reasonable audience for journalism (print, broadcast or Web) that covers it. The Arctic, as the canary in the climatic coal mine and home to endangered charismatic megafauna (AKA polar bears), also seems to be a hot journalistic topic. Given that Barrow is served by at least two jet flights a day and has decent connectivity, we get our fair share of journalists, and a fair number of them want to talk to me.
The public pays for most archaeology (and other science) so I think they deserve to hear what they’re paying for us to learn, especially since most people are interested in other people and their doings, as opposed to, say, permafrost or midge hatches, for which the interested audience may be smaller. So I take the time to talk to journalists. I also try to find out a bit about the journalist in question. If I get the sense that they are not very experienced with science or research, I’ll offer to at least check dates and spellings in their story before it goes to print, pointing out that that’s less embarrassing than having to issue corrections of errors later. Some take me up; some don’t.
I also take the time to attend panels on working with the media at scientific meetings. They are usually composed of a variety of people who are public information officers for scientific organizations or institutions and science journalists, often quite well-known ones who write for national science magazines or newspapers. They are all very earnest and full of good advice. They are usually amazed at the questions asked by the audience, and horrified by those of us who want to see stories prior to publication. They seem bewildered that the archaeologists making up the audience don’t all see journalists as friends and a great help.
Of course, if all journalists were like the ones on the panels, we probably would see them that way. I’ve worked with some great folks. Angelika Franz, a German writer who has done several pieces about Nuvuk, actually has a doctorate in archaeology, so she’s been great to work with, knowing what sorts of information are critical to get right, and understanding technical terms so we can concentrate on the interesting parts of the story. She has done pieces for Spiegel Online Wissenschaft, a magazine called Epoc and now she’s got a book coming out with a number of pieces she’s done.
I had great fun being interviewed (in Danish) by some Danish journalists who were retracing Knud Rasmussen’s travels across Arctic America. The story wound up mostly being about the fact that I have a complete set of the 5th Thule Report, in Barrow. We also had a nice trip to Nuvuk in the local tour van, which resulted in some good polar bear pictures for them.
Most of the others have been reasonably competent, and haven’t garbled the stories too much, although they haven’t written stories that answer the sorts of questions people ask me.
And then there are the others. There was a group of filmmakers working on video for a major producer of science programming. They had decided to focus on an ice scientist and his (cute female) grad student. It was spring, so there was not much to see at Nuvuk, but they wanted to go there anyway. They wanted to film them pulling up on snow machines. The tracks aren’t the best thing for the site, but we had already excavated the area near the bluffs, so I said that would be OK there. Of course, they didn’t like the shot, or the light, and wanted to have them coming from a different angle, and retake it, and I kept having to tell them to stay in the cleared area. Then they decided that the scientists/protagonists should start scraping away gravel from logs (actually a NARL-era sled shed base) projecting from the bluff, with their mittens. Since this is precisely what we want the public to avoid, it didn’t’ seem like a good idea to show them SCIENTISTS doing it on a reputable science TV series. I pointed that out, to no avail. So I told them I couldn’t be party to that, on film or off, and since they seemed bent on damaging the site, which belonged to my employer, I was going to have to ask them to leave.
Better yet was a Barrow reporter for the local newspaper, the Arctic Sounder. The Sounder is not a bad paper given the area it covers and the budget it has. However, I doubt that the editor considers this fellow one of his better hires. He was an odd duck. He once asked me to help him set up the Mac that the paper had given him so that he could file electronically. I got everything set up, and then went to plug the modem into the phone line (this was some years ago). He would not let me. I suggested that we could test it, and then he could plug it in to file and unplug it. No dice. He also thought there was a hole at the North Pole. He interviewed me about some work I had been doing, and in the course of the interview asked me how long people had been in the Barrow area. I said it was hard to be sure, since sea levels had risen and between that and erosion the earliest evidence was probably gone, but that there was some Arctic Small Tool Tradition (ASTt) material there, which was probably “4 to 5 thousand years old”.
Imagine my surprise at being quoted (in quotation marks, no less) as having said that there were “45,000-year-old Eskimos” in the Barrow area! I got calls from folks as far away as Pennsylvania (Tiger Burch for one) who basically wanted to know if I was off my rocker. When I suggested to the reporter that perhaps a correction was in order, he refused on the grounds that “someday they’ll find 45,000-year-old sites here, and then you’ll have been the first to say it in print.” I have heard, although I can’t confirm, that he was removed from town in a straitjacket.
And they wonder why archaeologists view journalists with a somewhat jaundiced eye…
Today the Saturday Schoolyard talk was about warming permafrost. The speaker was Dr. Vladimir Romanovsky, head of the Permafrost Laboratory at the Geophysical Institute at UAF. He gave a really good talk, explaining what permafrost is (permanently frozen ground, basically), why it matters if it melts, and how permafrost researchers go about taking its temperature (with thermistor (temperature sensor) strings down boreholes, mostly). He then went on to show how permafrost temperatures had changed through time as the atmospheric temperature had changed.
After that, he moved to predictive modeling based on climatic models. Using even a fairly middle-of-the-road climate model, it doesn’t look too good for permafrost in Alaska by the end of the century. He also showed active layer (the soil layer at the top that freezes and thaws every year) modeling done on a similar basis some years ago, and pointed out that over the 10 years since the model was run it had been spot on in its predictions. The active layer is clearly going to be a lot deeper if the predictions hold.
This is not good news for Arctic archaeology. Compared to most of the rest of the world, where archaeologists are left to puzzle out what people were doing from a few stone tools, waste flakes and potsherds, we get really good organic preservation here, which makes it possible to look at questions that can’t be addressed elsewhere for lack of relevant data. The reason the preservation is so good is in large part permafrost, and permanently frozen sites. Last week, when Claire was here, we were getting a lot of well-preserved 1600-1700 year old marine invertebrates from the samples. They exist because the layer was frozen for most, if not all, of that time.
I’m been thinking a lot about site destruction, and how to determine which areas are at highest risk, in order to prioritize field efforts. Perhaps because coastal erosion is the big and immediate threat at Nuvuk (and all the other coastal sites I’ve worked at except for Ipuitak, where the immediate threat was the seawall being built to prevent coastal erosion), I’ve tended to focus on that, as well as eroding river banks for sites along rivers. The melting of exposed ice wedges, which then leads to collapse of the overlying ground is also something I’ve been concerned about. And these are major threats, which can tumble entire houses upside down on the beach for the waves to destroy.
Undercutting by waves caused the gravel to slump from underneath this grave at Nuvuk.Storm-driven surf tears into the mound at Ukkuqsi in Barrow.Tunnel remnants after the storm. The house was to the left, where only thin air can be seen.Ice wedge in bluffs near Barrow. They can be much larger.Slump block on beach at Barrow after a storm.Slumps from thawing ground along a Colville River cut bank.A Colville River cut bank from the air. Notice the earlier slump that has stabilized and even grown over, and the fresh cut at the bottom from the river's current.
I hadn’t thought much at all about the risks to Arctic archaeology from a significant deepening of the active layer, which will mean that artifacts and ecofacts (animal bones, insects, etc.) will freeze and thaw every year (which is hard on things to begin with, often causing rocks and bones to split) and while they are thawed, they will be decaying. Even now, really old sites don’t have much organic preservation. Even sites that are in no danger of eroding are threatened with the gradual invisible loss of a great deal of the information they now contain.
Obviously, if we are going to develop a “threat matrix” for Arctic archaeological sites, this has to be part of it. I talked to Vlad a bit after the talk, and he thought he had students who could be put to work on this problem, perhaps by combining what we know about site locations in Alaska (by no means a complete listing) and the existing models for permafrost change. He also said that one could do active layer modeling for a specific site with a year’s worth of soil and air temperatures, so that’s something we definitely need to get started on.
One of the fun parts of the job is that people find all sorts of things around Barrow. Often, they show them to me, or at least send me pictures. In a lot of cases I can ID them, but I’m not expert on extinct fauna, and the printed/online resources available are not as good as those for modern critters.
I usually send pictures to some folks at UAF (University of Alaska Fairbanks), since they actually have a pretty good collection. Unfortunately their current curator of mammals flatly denies any knowledge (!) of extinct animals, and doesn’t seem inclined to rural residents of the state that pays his salary by taking a peek in the collections to try to make an ID. So I’m broadening the search.
This particular tooth was given to the current owner. Matu believes it was found in a gravel operation near Barrow, AK. He’s really anxious to know what it is. If you have any ideas what it might be from, please let me know. If you have any colleagues who might be able to ID it, we’d appreciate it if you’d give them the URL for this post and ask them to take a look if they have time.
The following pictures aren’t great. I didn’t have a tripod or photo stand, or decent lighting. If you think you know what it might be, but need better pictures (not hard to imagine) or a particular angle, let me know and I’ll see if I can have him bring it to the lab for a better-lit portrait.
Mystery tooth from near Barrow, AK.Root of mystery tooth.Close-up of mystery tooth. Any comments on traces at photo center?
Barrow is a pretty interesting place in terms of the sheer amount and variety of science that gets done here, as it has been since the 1st International Polar Year (IPY). It can be hard keeping track of it even if you live here and are a scientist. We don’t have a local newspaper reporter, and the radio station can no longer afford a full-time reporter, so there is no local source of science stories for the general public.
Many scientists want to let people know what they are doing, and what they are learning by it, but there are a number of barriers (another post for another day). One way is blogging. On bigger hard-science projects, websites and more are possible, since the cost of people to take care of them is really a tiny portion of the project budget.
A recent project called OASIS really takes this to another level. Dr. Paul Shepson, the PI, actually built in an author to write about the project, and things grew from there. Peter Lourie, the author, has written two children’s’ books and has moved on to multimedia. They’ve made a really neat website, which has video from a number of scientists who work in Barrow. There’s a lot from various folks on the OASIS project, but also from people who live in Barrow, like Fran Tate of Pepe’s, whaling captain Eugene Brower and even me. I actually got interviewed twice, because the sound on the first set got messed up, so I had to do it all over again when Peter came up again!
While the dental extern was busy in the lab, Laura was there to help her find things, answer questions, and so forth. I was busy with other things.
A couple of Navy archaeologists (yes, the US Navy has archaeologists) were in Barrow last week to look at a tract that the Navy may be transferring to UIC, the Barrow village corporation, to get an idea of what needs to be done to comply with cultural resource protection laws prior to transferring Federal land. Neither of them has any Arctic experience, and they stopped by my office to pick my brain a bit. The next day they were doing a few STPs on an old beach ridge on the tract, and asked if I’d like to join them. It was a warm sunny day, with not much wind, and therefore many mosquitos. I hiked our from my office building to meet them, we checked out the area a bit & I hiked back. Other than all the bugs, it was great.
Navy archaeologists David Grant and Bruce Larson surveying.
We didn’t find anything cultural that was older than NARL, but we did find a couple very old gravel beaches. We did find some stakes that had probably marked research plots, and a big aluminum object that looked like an aircraft part. It had some cable attached to the front, as if someone had been trying to tow it. Apparently they gave up. If you happen to recognize this, please let me know and I’ll pass the information on.
Large aluminum mystery object on Navy tract.
The next day I got a call from the City of Barrow. They run the cemeteries, and had been getting reports that a coffin was partially open. They had checked, and indeed a coffin had been frost-heaved and was damaged. They asked if I could come over when they moved the person into a new coffin. We decided to do it the next afternoon, after they got the new coffin built.
Fortunately, the old coffin wasn’t damaged except for a bit of the lid, so we were able to get the dirt off to make it lighter without disturbing the remains. The City crew was able to lift the entire box out and place it in the new larger coffin. It was a tight fit, because the old coffin had been covered with canvas that was nailed on, but that wasn’t clear when they had measured for the new box! Luckily they had left a bit of space, so they were able to pry a bit and get it in. I got the canvas that had frozen in out so it could go along. I’d mostly been there in case the coffin was fragile and we had to transfer the individual, to make sure that nothing got left, but that wasn’t needed.
Once the coffin was out of the grave, the idea was to dig it a bit deeper, and then rebury the person. The soil profile was pretty interesting. There was clay (which generally is deposited on the bottom of bodies of still water) very close to the surface, despite the fact that the grave was on a mound. Apparently the permafrost has pushed it up a good bit, although it may have been deposited when sea level was higher than today.
Permanently frozen clay exposed in grave in Barrow cemetery.
The crew did what they could with shovels, but thaw was not that deep, as you can see from the picture above, so they were going to get a compressor and jack hammer, to really get the grave deeper, when I left. If not, frost heaving would just bring the box up again in a few years.
Out of Ice and Time 