Walakpa–July 26, 2015

The crew (Owen Mason, Anne Garland, Mary Beth Timm, Laura Crawford and myself) gathered out at NARL, at a small yellow warehouse. We were using UIC Science archaeological gear. IHLC & Ilisagvik College let us use some tents, sleeping pads & kitchen gear. We managed to get everything packed into side-by-sides and trailers and headed off to Walakpa with Sean Gunnells, Oona Edwardsen and Ray Kious of the UICS logistics staff who weren’t otherwise occupied.

We got to Walakpa around 2PM. We got camp set up, with a slight hitch because some of the tents had not been repacked properly when last used. However, the logistics staff dealt with it, and headed back to town.

We uncovered portions of the bluff so that we could examine the profiles and decide where we want to take the column sample. While walking the beach examining the bluff profiles, we noticed that there was a cultural layer exposed in the mound with one of the two monuments on it. Anne Garland laid out a 1×1 meter test, well back from the edge of the bluff, to see if it continued across the mound.

Laura Crawford excavating the SW quadrant of a 1x1 while Mary Beth Timm looks on. — Laura Crawford excavating the SW quadrant of a 1×1 while Mary Beth Timm looks on. View NE along the coast toward Barrow.

It was clear that we couldn’t safely do a profile in the central area where the meat cache had been, since there was still an overhang. In addition, some of the geotextile fabric protecting the site was pinned by collapse of bluffs, preventing its removal. Eventually, after cleaning profiles on either side of the overhang, we picked a spot and Owen went to work on a detailed drawing.

We had visitors in the early morning, a young couple whose ATV had a flat, and were hoping that we had a tire pump. Unfortunately, we didn’t, so they headed on up the coast with both of them on one side of the ATV.

DNA results from the North Slope published!

When we first started archaeological work at Nuvuk, it took a while to find a physical anthropologist who was willing to work with the human remains here in Barrow. Dennis O’ Rourke and his team were willing to do that. Dennis came up to Barrow to speak to the community and the Elders to get their permission. His lab works with genetic studies as well as skeletal material, and he asked if they would be interested in allowing ancient DNA studies on the remains from Nuvuk. The Elders were not only interested in those studies, they suggested that the group undertake a program of modern DNA studies across the North Slope as well. They developed a proposal to do just that, and once it was funded, research got underway, with resident of all seven North Slope communities contributing samples.

The analysis took a while. The team traveled to all the villages to collect the data and returned to present the results to North Slope residents before they were published. Finally, the first paper based on the project is published! It is based on looking at mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from your mother. It is present in many more copies than the more familiar (to most people) nuclear DNA, and therefore is often studied in archaeological situations, since all the extra copies make it more likely that some of it will survive.

The short version is that the modern DNA results support the North Slope as the source for the populations that migrated to the eastern Arctic, both the Neoeskimo (ancestors of today’s Inuit/Inupiat people) and the earlier Paleoeskimo. This fits well with the picture from the archaeological data.

Jennifer Raff is senior author, with Margarita Rzhetskaya, Justin Tackney and Geoff Hayes as co-authors.

This paper has gotten picked up by a number of science news sources.

Edit: 4/30/15 Fixed a link that WP had put an ellipsis in the middle of the link. It should work now.

Help wanted!

Crew members wanted

Nuvuk Archaeology Project

Walakpa Archaeological Salvage Project

WALRUS – Walrus Adaptability and Long-term Responses; Using multi-proxy data to project Sustainability

——————-

We are seeking students (high school or college) to work in the archaeological laboratory on artifacts as part of several NSF-funded research projects. The lab crew will be working on processing artifacts excavated at Nuvuk, Walakpa and other North Slope sites.

This will involve cleaning (gently), sorting, marking, cataloging and preparing some items for transfer to a long-term repository. We will also be going through and sorting some frozen organic samples from an earlier project in Barrow that have been sent back from New York State.

We also will be attempting to find walrus bones in these collections for analysis at UAF. There is a possibility for student travel in connection with that project.

You do not need any prior experience; we can train you. Many archaeology crew members start as high school students. Once you learn how to do the work, scheduling can be very flexible. If you have skills in drawing, photography, or data entry, we can really use your help as well! Starting wages will depend on experience and qualifications.

To apply, send a resume and cover letter to Anne Jensen, anne.jensen@uicscience.org as soon as possible. You can use the contact form below for questions.

The smell of old seal oil in the afternoon…

… can be a bit overpowering. I chose one of the bags of frozen samples from Utiqiaġvik to thaw out for the lab tour after the Saturday Schoolyard talk.

The talk went well, with a very large turn out. Afterwards, a fair number of them came by the lab for a tour. And then I opened the bag. It was from Mound 8, and was described as containing fish bones and perhaps artifacts embedded in seal oil.

It was rather smelly to say the least. The oil made up most of the matrix, with a consistency like cold greasy peanut butter. Not only that, the most obvious contents were wood chips and hair, which weren’t too exciting. Most folks didn’t feel like hanging around too long. Since it was my birthday & there was a party at my house, I didn’t finish the bag.

Today I got back to work on it for an hour or so. It still smelled, I guess, but I think the smell of old seal oil is sort of nice. It’s the smell of archaeological sites, and they are places I like to be. The couple of extra days had let the oil warm up and it was a little easier to work with.

I found a number of interesting things, including a fish vertebra, some fish scales, a number of hairs, some bone fragments, and of course, wood chips. When I was labeling the bags, I realized it had been excavated by none other than Kevin Smith, now at the Haffenreffer, exactly 32 years and 3 months ago.

Tomorrow I’ll do some more.

A book about Nuvuk

I made it back from DC on Thursday night. Friday was the usual scramble after being out of town. Saturday night was the annual meeting of the Friends of the Library. There was a business meeting, and a potluck dinner. But the highlight of the meeting was the guest speaker, none other than Daniel Inulak Lum, author of the book Nuvuk, the Northernmost: Altered Land, Altered Lives in Barrow, Alaska.

Dan Lum showing slides of the photos in his book

Dan’s family is Nuvukmiut (that’s how it is spelled in Nuvuk dialect–it would be Nuvugmiut in Barrow dialect), originally from Nuvuk. He ran a tour company which took tourists to Nuvuk for much of the time the Nuvuk Archaeological Project was active. While doing that, he wound up taking a whole lot of pictures. He has some really great animal photos, particularly of bears, as well as some really beautiful landscapes shots. His family had to move to Fairbanks for a while for reasons connected to health of a family member, so he isn’t running the tour company any more, but it gave him an opportunity to look through his pictures and he wound up writing a book about Nuvuk and life in Barrow.

When he was running the tour company, Dan gave great tours. He really wanted to pass on accurate information to his clients, and would stop at our excavations and talk to us, so he had the latest news. As he said in his talk, the village is no longer there (due to erosion) so all the Nuvukmiut have to remember it by is information from oral history and archaeology. He’d always check to see if it was OK to bring the tourists over (not if we were excavating human remains), and was always willing to bring things back and forth for us in his van. When the Ipiutak sled runners were uncovered, Dan stood by until we had them out of the ground around 2AM (despite having had tours all day) and then drove them very slowly back to the lab at NARL, making sure that they weren’t bounced around. It took over an hour to go the five or so miles. He also brought pop out for the crew on warm days.

Dan showed slides of many of the photos from the book, and talked about how he came to write a book in the first place. He was very encouraging to audience members about writing and publishing their own books.

I’m going to be spending a good bit of time getting ready for International Archaeology Day, which is Saturday.

Some media attention, and why it can be a double-deged sword

For some reason, this year there has been quite a bit of media interest in Barrow and archaeology. To begin with, there were several film crews in Barrow while we were working at Walakpa, two of which actually came out to the site and filmed as well as filming in the lab. Only one of them has anything out yet. PBS filmed for several both in the field and in the lab, and a little bit of it made it into this piece, and a shot in the slideshow that they put up on the web in conjunction with the series on sea ice change. It was a very buggy day in the field, and it was quite the challenge not to be swatting mosquitoes all the time.

Oh, and the buoy experiment that Ignatius Rigor is working on in the film clip is supported by UIC Science staff (not that they have to do much, the idea is to see how the buoys do with no servicing). Their data can be compared to data from ARM’s established serviced meteorological instruments. That way, when scientists get buoy data, they have an idea how reliable it is, and if there are any special considerations in interpretation (becoming uncalibrated over time, etc.)

We’ve also gotten interest from the press. Abra Stolte-Patkotak, one of our volunteers writes for the Arctic Sounder, and did a piece on the Walakpa excavations, which is on-line here. For some reason, they don’t have the picture that was published up on-line, but I will ask Abra if I can put it up here & add it if so.

I am currently working with a free-lancer who has interviewed me and asked me to fact check the article before he goes further. A very good idea, as many years ago I was interviewed by a reporter who mis-heard my answer to the question of how far back in time human occupation of the Barrow area was archaeologically demonstrated to extend. I said “maybe 4 to 5 thousand years” which was what people thought reasonable for Denbigh at the time. He refused fact-checking help, and published an article in which I was directly quoted as saying “45,000 years”. Although Glenn & I could never get the Arctic Sounder to mail our subscription to us in Pennsylvania, apparently Tiger Burch could. I got a very puzzled email from him after the article came out, in which I believe he was politely trying to ask me if I’d lost my mind. Fortunately, he had enough experience with the press that he believed the explanation.

Tacos on the Tundra–up in flames :-(

Thursday, we had an even more exciting trip to Walakpa, which really messed up my back, so I was pretty much flat on my back when not actually working. I was going to do a post about that this morning, but when I woke up, there was very sad news. Pepe’s North of the Border burned to the ground last night.

All that's left of Pepe's — All that’s left of Pepe’s

Top of the World Hotel in the background

The bank building almost caught on fire too. Great save NSBFD!

There was some damage to the Top of the World Hotel, including the destruction of the entrance. As you can see, the bank building nearly caught fire as well. It’s charred and a lot of windows are broken, but the North Slope Borough Fire Department managed to save it. Much credit to them.

Fran Tate, who started and owns Pepe’s is quite ill, and in Anchorage for medical treatment. She’s donated a lot to her adopted hometown (free meals for school sports teams, food for bereaved families, fund-raising for children’s hospitals, just for starters) and here’s hoping some way can be found to help resurrect Pepe’s. We are going to be hurting for restaurant seats and catering here in Barrow if not.

August 15th at Walakpa–78 years ago and today

Seventy-eight years ago, it was a foggy day at Walakpa. The Okpeaha family was camping there. A floatplane descended out of the fog, and two men asked how to get to Barrow, since they had lost their bearings in the fog. Getting directions, the got back in the plane and took off. The engine failed, and the nose-heavy aircraft crashed into the lagoon and flipped. Unable to reach the plane to help the men, Clare Okpeaha ran all the way to Brower’s Trading Post in Barrow, over 12 miles of very rough going, to get help. When boats got back to Walakpa & they got to the plane, it became clear the men had been killed instantly. They were Will Rogers, a noted humorist and political commentator, who was traveling around Alaska to get stories for the newspapers, and Wiley Post, probably the most famous American aviator of the time after Charles Lindbergh.

The crash was national news at the time, and a few years later a monument was erected near the site, followed some time later by another one. These are the monuments that show up in some of the pictures of the site. For some reason, these are on the National Register of Historic Places, but the archaeological site isn’t.

: The first monument , looking out over the lagoon where the crash occurred.

Today was a much better day at Walakpa. We headed down with 7 volunteers, including David Pettibone, Michael Berger, dental extern Temurkin Cucukov, and the entire Von Duyke family, plus Marybeth Timm from the Inupiat Heritage Center. The stream was running high and fast at Nunavak, but we got across, although not before I got my boot wet. With that many people, it seemed worth getting the water screening going, so we did, using a small pump to take water out of the lagoon. Alan & Scott Kerner happened by on an ATV ride and pitched in for a while as well.

: Wet screeners in action by the lagoon.

The rest of us continued with taking down the rather disturbed level under the sod. It would be a lot easier if we could just shovel it out, but the bluff doesn’t seem that stable & we’re afraid we’ll knock the whole thing down if we shovel, especially since there are still a lot of roots holding things together at this level.

: Excavating the disturbed layer. Note the Visqueen.

A while after we got there, a boat pulled in, and Jeff Rasic from the National Park Service (in town for a meeting at the Inupiat Heritage Center) Patuk Glenn (IHC) and Kunneak Nageak (IHLC) appeared. They got a good tour, and spent a bit of time wandering around. Jeff found a big sod with a lot of artifacts in it, including several very nice potsherds, one with residue, which we collected.

: Excavation at Walakpa. L. to R. Marybeth Timm, Temerkin Cucukov, Michael Berger, Jeff Rasic, David Pettibone & Trina Brower.

: Potsherds.

The ride home was even more exciting. Nunavak wasn’t too bad, but they were unloading a barge on the beach, so we took the old Nunavak “road” back to town. It has pretty much disappeared back into the tundra on the middle section the last few years, and it was a very muddy ride!

On the way to Aukureyri

I’m heading to Akureyri, Iceland, to take part in a workshop and a NABO Open Meeting. It’s a fairly long trip from Barrow to anywhere, but Icelandair is now flying direct Anchorage-Reykjavik, so that’s a help. Not surprisingly, seats on the July 4th departure were very, very cheap, so it was more cost effective to fly me to Iceland then, and put me up in Reykjavik for a couple of days before I head to Akureyri.

When I left Barrow, the ice had come back in. I got a good shot of the only operational heavy icebreaker in the US fleet, USCG Polar Star lying off Barrow. You can see masts belonging to much smaller vessels off her bow. They are a French group who are trying to take a catamaran to the North Pole (it apparently can move over ice as well as water, or they hope so). They beat Polar Star to Barrow by a couple days.

USCG Polar Star off Barrow in the ice. — USCG *Polar Star* off Barrow in the ice.

The flight from Anchorage leaves at 3:15 PM AKDT, and gets in at 6AM local (GMT) which is before bedtime in Alaska, so I didn’t get much sleep. I was wiped, so I took a nap, planning to get up and go wandering about Reykjavik. Alas, the weather didn’t cooperate. When I got up, it was raining & blowing 25+.

View out the livingroom window of the B&B — View out the living room window of the B&B

So I confined my walking to a trip to the grocery store and bakery. Lots of nice local vegetables for good prices–geothermal greenhouses can do wonders.

This morning the weather had improved, so I headed out to see some sights. I had intended to check out a Danish restaurant, but wound up doing something else entirely. I found a food truck selling grass-fed beef hamburgers, which smelled wonderful. So that’s what I had. Then I wound up heading down to the harbor.

The green buildings on the left are former (mostly) fishmongers’ stalls that have been converted to shops & restaurants. I wound up getting a bracelet made of wolfish leather. There are still the old ladders, presumably for self-rescue by unfortunate fishermen who fell in on the way back to the ship.

There were the expected Icelandic coast guard ships. There were also a Danish naval ship and a German Fisheries Protection ship tied up.

Danish ship. — Danish naval fisheries inspection ship, probably HDMS Triton.

And there were several large fishing vessels out of the water.

Fishing vessel in the yard. — Fishing vessel in the yard, being scraped & painted.

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Crew members wanted

Nuvuk Archaeology Project

Walakpa Archaeological Salvage Project

WALRUS – Walrus Adaptability and Long-term Responses; Using multi-proxy data to project Sustainability

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