Tag: Nuvuk

Plenty of fish

Excavation of the hearth & surroundings continued.  When we first found fish bones we were pretty excited.   We just keep finding more in and near the hearth and I must admit the thrill is rapidly fading 🙂 . We’re finding some other bone too, not all of which has been burnt past the point of recognition.

The egg was successfully extracted and packaged, and has made it back to the lab, I hope more or less intact.  We shall see when we start processing things.  If we can’t figure out what it was, Dennis said they’ll take a crack at IDing it through DNA.

Two neat finds

We started investigating the last GPR hit and came down on a jumble of wood.  The excavators were not optimistic, but I kept pushing to go a little further.  Eventually, this appeared:

Feature detected with GPR

The feature (I’m not calling it a burial until there is evidence of human remains) was jumbled because at some time after it was constructed, someone dug a hole in the middle of it.  And right beside where the hole had punched into the feature was this:

Antler arrowpoint

The hole just missed it.

The DWF (Ipiutak) levels had their own surprises.  We found a good bit of fish bone, some lithics (nothing diagnostic) and a lot of broken bone, but the really cool thing, which I found on the edge of the hearth, was a flattened but apparently complete egg!

The remains of the egg

Looks like it’s a hearth

We were a small crew today since the high school students weren’t working, so we concentrated on the Ipiutak area. It was fairly tricky to excavate, since there is unconsolidated gravel under the Wood/sand/gravel layer that covers the Ipiutak surface, and a large pile of unconsolidated gravel uphill from the features.  Plus the hearth ash is covered with a mushy skin of peat, and both the hearth surface and the peat undulate.  Despite that, we recovered 2 fin rays, some burnt bone, a pot-lidded flake (probably rhyolite), a grey chert flake, and a black biface fragment from the hearth.  We also got some large ungulate (species in dispute at the moment–probably caribou) bone, and a small fragment of decorated ivory, plus several interesting pieces of wood, which appear to be worked.

It was quite cold.  Even though we had a windbreak, the levels are just thawing, and the ground is cold and wet.  My hands are still stiff, so more will have to wait until tomorrow.

Much gravel is moved

We spent most of the day with shovel testing, shooting in pits and moving gravel.  The gravel moving was in aid of getting a better look at the worked wood protruding from the erosion face at what appears to be the Ipiutak level.  So far, there seems to have been a fire and a lot of ash in association with one of the wood features, and it’s not clear if it was a hearth or a structure that burned accidentally.  Opening it up a bit more would help, but it is under a lot of gravel.

Structural timbers with possible hearth in Ipiutak level

The crew did yeoman work, and much gravel was moved, so we can get a look tomorrow.  There is actually a frozen layer under where most of them are standing, which will have thawed by tomorrow if we are lucky.

Flying gravel! L to R: Adam, Trace, Laura, Candace, Dennis, Tom

Sunshine & blue skies…

…and a full crew.  We started work on the burial under the plank.  It took quite a while, as the plank was complex to define.  It was all one piece, in some places up to 9 cm thick, and had obviously required a great deal of work and skill to make.  The top surface looked like the outer surface of the tree.  The bottom surface showed evidence of burning, in some areas completely charcoal.  It should be good for C14 dating.

The remains are those of a large male.  Preservation is a bit variable, but it looks like there might be some ribs that could yield aDNA.  In any event, he will be safely out of the trail.

Many on the crew did STPs.  So far nothing has shown up.  It is beginning to look as if there is a gap in the burials (or at least a much thinner distribution).  I’ve begun to wonder if this could be the result of a village move due to erosion, which brought the village close to the cemetery and made them skip a bit of ground to put the new cemetery at a proper distance from their residences.

At least it was a beautiful day.

Back at it…

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.

Notched log resting on another log. Ipiutak?

Still working on it…maybe

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.

More on all this later.

One turns into three…

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 rear
Jared pushing the GPR lawnmower in a brief foggy period

First field day!

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…