Tag: burial

A Cold Day at Nuvuk

It has been a busy week, with all sorts of things to do after the day’s fieldwork was over and the data was downloaded and backed up, including a public meeting (which will need to be rescheduled because the weather was nice and the TV didn’t get it on the announcement roll-around in time), baking dozens of cookies for the community potluck my employer was holding, and dealing with the aftermath of a minor ATV accident involving one of the students (she is fine, but wrenched an already sore shoulder and therefore will be on limited duty next week). We have tomorrow off, so I’ll provide more details and pictures on the fieldwork then.

Just a quick note while I try to get the flash card downloading. The pictures are all shot as hi-res JPEGs and RAW, so it takes forever. I doubt I can stay up long enough to post pictures tonight.

We worked today. Normally we do fieldwork Monday-Friday, because the students are paid by the hour (so they get practical job experience as well as archaeological training) and child labor laws make it complicated to work more than that, especially for the younger students. We had a vacation day on Monday, though, and since it’s a short season and some of the students are trying to earn money we decided to do a 5-day week anyway. In the end, only 5 of them made it to work today. One was out of town, Trina was taking part in a fundraiser for the basketball and volleyball teams, two were sick, one was hurt and we don’t know what happened to the other one. It was wicked cold this morning, so hats off to Rochelle, Trace, Nora, Warren and Victoria. Not only was it cold, it was windy & foggy (yes, at the same time). In fact, it was so foggy we were having trouble with the transit because the lens and/or the reflector kept getting obscured by water drops. And it rained before lunch, and toward the end of the day.

However, as compensation, we finished excavation of the first burial of the season.  It turned out to have been disturbed, probably in the late 1880s, judging by the artifacts scattered along an old ground surface along with some of the individual’s bones.  We found some very cool artifacts (a bit unusual for Nuvuk burial excavations) although they weren’t really in the burial.  Highlights were a copper end-blade (for a harpoon head or possibly arrow), a split blue glass bead, and best of all, the cartridge for a shoulder gun.  The last still seems to have a bit of black powder around the primer area, so we have it in VERY wet conditions, and I will try to clean it tomorrow before there is any chance of the powder drying at all.  Our bear guard, Larry Aiken, who is a whaler, said it was the oldest style, shorter than the ones they use now.

As further compensation, we decided to order our lunches from the fundraiser, so Trina brought 13 lunches to the end of the road to Nuvuk (called my cell before she headed out), and Larry took a trailer back to get them.  So we all had BBQ chicken, potato salad, rice, pancit and a hot dog for lunch, along with the hot beverage of our choice and chips courtesy of Nora!  Even with the big propane cooker going the tent was cold enough to see our breath.  We hung in and finished the burial, and tested the areas where two other single human bones had turned up in a trail.  Neither one had a grave beneath it.  We already have 3 other probable graves, based on subsurface indications in STPs, waiting for us next week.

Choosing the crew

A big part of the past couple weeks has involved choosing the crew for work at Nuvuk.  There are two funding sources for this project.  One is a grant to the North Slope Borough from the Department of Education, through the Education through Cultural and Historical Organizations program (ECHO), and the other is a regular research grant from the Arctic Social Sciences program of the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation.

The ECHO funds are targeted at K-12 education, so they need to be used for pre-college students and those who teach/supervise them.  We’ve been focusing on high school students for those slots.  For one thing, we run the dig for these students as a job.  That way, even if they don’t find their life’s work in archaeology, they’ll have some spending money for the next school year, and will have learned about interviews, resumes, time-sheets, paychecks and good work habits before they are out on their own.  Students who are less than 15 are very restricted in the hours they can work, even in the summer.  The first year, we hired a couple of students that young, only to find that every time we needed to stay late in the field (usually because something exciting was happening) we’d have to send them home or violate child labor laws.  Essentially, they got punished for being young, which was really no fun for anyone :-(.  After that, we only hired students who were older, and could work some OT, so they wouldn’t need to go home just when things got really exciting.

We’ve been doing interviews with students who haven’t worked before, both to assess motivation and to make sure they understand what they are getting into.  It’s really cold at Nuvuk, even compared to Barrow, and the wind comes right off the ice.  With the field season so short, and the erosion ongoing, we don’t take many weather days.

We’ve also been seeing who is returning, and for how much of the season they are available.  Many of the high school students who want to work at Nuvuk are active in many things, including sports (with summer camps), band, Mayor’s Youth Advisory Council, Model UN, and Rural Alaska Honors Institute.  Most of these involve some travel, so scheduling is complex.  We need to have a good-size crew, but not more than we have 4-wheelers for (allowing for a couple of folks in the lab or sick).  I actually do that in MS Project, just so I can get a clear picture and spot pinch-points more easily.

Anyway, we’ve got all the high school students selected, and have notified most of them, except for the ones who are out of town on family vacations.  We’ve also got one person on tap for the NSF-funded crew, but it looks like we might have room for 1-2 more, since the planned GPR component fell through.  Rhett Herman, a geophysicist from Radford U. in Virginia who has worked with us at Nuvuk in the past, was going to do some geophysical prospecting for burials, which would save us much time & effort.  He had hoped to run a field school, but funding was not available for this summer, so a couple of interested students were going to come up as participants in the dig and help with the GPR on the side.  Rhett’s wife has come down with some unexplained health problems, and he obviously doesn’t want to travel so far while they are unresolved. Looks like -2 for the crew.  So I need to see if I can find suitable replacements.