Foggy Weekend

Old Womens with the dogs

It was a foggy weekend.  It cleared up in the evenings, but was foggy and misty the rest of the time.  Still I got in a hike on each day and the wet conditions meant I had an excuse not to mow the lawn.

On Saturday I lead an Audubon Hike halfway up Mount Monashka and then made a loop out Termination Point.  Both Stuey and Nora came along for the hike.  This is the first time they both came along on an Audubon hike.  There were some fractious moments but in general they did well.  Nora stopped for every ripe blueberry that she saw while Stuey whacked offending devilsclub bushes with my ski poles.

On Sunday they visited with their cousins and picked a gallon of blueberries close to home.  In the meantime I took the dogs for a long walk up Old Womens Mountain.  Patrick

A very wet Bumble bee on a fireweed

The route of our hike in the fog on Saturday

Some of the Blueberries that Nora and Stuey picked

Old Stuff

On Friday we got to the bottom of the site and found the really old stuff - blades and cores.  We did not find any evidence for structures, features like hearths, projectile points, flakes or really much of anything else.  We found nothing except blades and the cores they were struck from.  Many of the blades had been retouched along the edges and had probably been used as impromptu knives.

We really did not find anything substantial, and every blade or artifact that we did find was an isolated find.  There were no hot spots were we found a bunch of flakes or tools all at once. In a couple of the squares we removed all of the thick deposit (20 - 30 cm thick) and found absolutely nothing.

In the test pit we dug earlier in the week we did find a red ochre stained living surface, but in the main block further to the north where we were digging on Friday we found no such surfaces.  Just the occasional red ochre fleck or small areas of ochre smeared surfaces  What we found hints at repeated but 'ephemeral' visits. The visitors to the site were not staying long and were probably using the blades for some sort of specialized activity - maybe for cutting up cod?  Since we found no projectile points it does not look like it was a hunting camp.  Nor were they doing much flint knapping at the site.

As I said in an earlier post, blades are only found in the earliest sites on Kodiak.  Based on radiocarbon dates at other sites they dropped out of the Alutiiq toolkit around 7000 years ago.  Another characteristic of early Alutiiq sites is that they tend to contain a lot of tools made from rocks imported from the Alaska Peninsula.  We found only a few pieces of the local red chert in the deposits at the bottom of Qik'rtangcuk.  Practically everything we found was made from imported rock.  I'm hopeful that when we radiocarbon the charcoal recovered from the site that we will get a very early date.  Patrick

Andrea with a retouched blade made from exotic yellow chert from the Alaska Peninsula

Keith and a basalt blade

Andrea with a blade/microblade core

The view from our lunch beach - we all generally take a nap after lunch

Not all cobble spalls and cod bones

Peter's basalt knife

These are all pictures from the first week of the excavation that I never got around to posting.  This is the stuff that while pretty does not match up with our story for the site.

Our story is that people came to the site to catch and process cod - hence the cobble spalls, lineweights, and cod bones (along with the charcoal and firecracked rock from the smoke-processing).  But of course they also did other things at the site.  If they saw a seal while fishing they would have harvested it and butchered it on the site (hence the side blade and knife).  They were there for the cod but as opportunists they also caught birds, sculpin and other animals while they were at the site.  We know this because we found the bones.

But in general our story holds.  Statistically speaking we found very little to contradict it.  It is the story that best fits the facts.
Patrick

Geena's Sideblade

A ground burin carving tool

Bird Pelvis

Digging in the rain

Digging in the rain

It has rained pretty much all week and things have been a little mucky at Qik'rtangcuk.  Mostly we have been hard at work in the museum lab washing and cataloguing the artifacts and drying out the samples collected last week.  But we did do a little digging.

On Tuesday and Wednesday Keith, Peter and I excavated a square to the south of the main block in the hopes of finding a more substantial 'really old' component under the 3-4 thousand year old 'cod processing' component.  In the main block we had been finding blades and other artifacts distinctive of the earliest people on the island, but nothing substantial.  My hope was that the earliest inhabitants had made more use of the base of the point.

And we got lucky!  Down near the bottom of our square we hit a living surface stained red with ochre and found a thick layer of deposits that do not seem to exist under the main block.  We had the 'really old' component left behind by the earliest inhabitants at the site.  This is where all the blades had been coming from!  

Blades are a distinctive artifact (basically long flakes with parallel sides struck off of a specialized core) that dropped out of the Alutiiq toolkit around 7000 years ago - so when you find them you know you got an old site.  And we found quite a few of them in the deposits at the bottom of the square. In fact, they were pretty much the only artifacts we found.  Usually in the older sites on Kodiak, and especially on red ochre stained living surfaces, you find a great a great many small flakes of stone - the debris of re furbishing stone tools.  But we only found blades, and that's a little strange.

This got me thinking - have we found another specialized type of site?  Maybe early cod-processing sites are characterized by re touched blades?  We'll have to dig more to find out!  And today it is not raining (fingers crossed)!
Patrick

Peter carefully collects charcoal that we will use to date the deposits

A red ochre stained living surface

Blades and retouched blades from the earliest component at the site

Smokepits, Plummets and Split Cobble Scrapers

Cobble Spalls - our most common artifact by FAR

The first week of the Community Archaeology dig is complete, and we already have a pretty good idea of what was going on at the site.  It looks like the main occupation dated to about 3 to 4 thousand years ago and that they were mostly processing and drying cod at the locality.  

For evidence we have found quite a few plummets which were used as line weights used to keep their fishing rigs on the ocean floor.  This style of line weight was only used on Kodiak 3-4 thousand years ago and is as good as a radiocarbon date for dating the site occupation.  We have also found hundreds of the cobble spalls used to process and clean the cod.  Then there is the large smoke-processing pit that is chock full of fired rock and charcoal stained soil.  The inhabitants heated the rocks and capped it with sods to create a smokey, long lived fire that would have smoked and dried cod meat hanging on some sort of rack.  We know they were processing a lot of cod because we found their bones preserved in the pit.

What's interesting is what we have NOT found.  Two years ago at the Kashevaroff Site we also found smoke processing features (click here), but there we also found slate lances, piece esquilles or wedges for breaking open bones, sideblades and flake knifes.  Put another way, we found a totally different tool kit that would have been used for catching and processing sea mammals.  They used spears and nets to catch the seals, sideblades and flake knives to cut them up, and wedges and utilized flakes to break open the bones and cut up the hides.

At a site on Buskin Lake that we excavated a few years ago we also found similar aged smoke processing features but they were presumably used to process salmon.  And we also found another totally different tool kit that consisted of bayonets with blunted tips used to spear the fish and ulus for cutting up the fish.  Basically at salmon processing sites you find ulus while at cod processing sites you find cobble spalls.  This is a really cool pattern!

The inhabitants at the Qik'rtangchuk site were pretty much there to just catch and process cod.  They probably then took the dried meat to a nearby village site.  Afterall, we did not find any evidence for old house depressions at the Qik'rtangchuk site either!  I think they were probably at the site in the late winter early spring when the cod are close to shore.  Later on in the year these same people were probably visiting the outlet of Buskin Lake to catch and dry salmon, and Salonie Creek to catch and dry seal meat.  The Qik'rtnchuk site was a special purpose site on their seasonal round.  

Patrick

Darius with plummet and notched cobble

Andrea with a plummet fragment that had broken off of Darius's plummet shown above

Keith and the top of the smoke processing pit feature

A pocket of preserved bone from near the bottom of the smoke-processing feature

A quick camping trip

Saturday evening the kids and I, Tank, and visiting archaeologist Peter hiked up to Heitman Lake and camped for the night.  Nora had a babysitting workshop/class all day Saturday (until 4PM), and we knew it was supposed to rain on Sunday.  So we had to pick someplace close to the road and yet exotic.  No Shelly Lake and Sharatin mountain for this trip!

Heitman Lake was perfect.  A beautiful lake and view over Womens Bay, and yet only a quick 800 foot vertical climb to the alpine.

We carried a bucket of firewood for the stove (thank you Peter!) and camped on a soft mat of crowberries and bunchberry.  So soft - who needs a tent floor?  Stuey does not like sleeping with bugs so I brought him a bug nest to set up inside the teepee.  I brought Nora her own lightweight tent.  Tank slept by the wood stove with Peter and I.

We lit the stove and cooked up a big pot of black beans and rice.  The sunset was gorgeous - shafts of golden light that spilled through the mountain passes and lit up the Coast Guard base and Bells Flats.

At night Tank stood guard at the tent door for an hour.  Then the fog rolled in.  For some reason we all woke up around 3 AM and town was lit up but visible below the fog.  Very cool looking.  Then it totally socked in and got wet.  Tank got cold and climbed down into my sleeping bag to dry out and warm up.

In the morning we lit the wood stove and had mashed potatoes for breakfast.  Tank and Peter had to make a trek to the lake for cooking water.  And then it was time for home.  All downhill to the car!
Patrick

Blueberries for Nora

Yesterday Nora, Stuey and Stuey's friend Elias joined me for the dog walk to the park.  I told them there are ripe blueberries and they were raring to go.  In most of the park the blueberries are still far from ripe but I know of a few bushes where the berries are large and ripe.

The kids had planned on making some sort of dessert, and brought along berry pails to fill.  But they proved too easy to resist and only a few berries made it home.  Patrick

Digging Away

We've been digging at the site for 4 days now, and I already have a pretty good story to tell (and will tell in another post soon).  The pictures in this post are mostly from earlier in the week. We are now MUCH deeper into the site and have even reached the bottom in one square.

It has been a fairly hot and sunny week, but every day we have been digging in the cool, cool shade.  Our site in situated in the alders and we did not cut any down when we opened up the site for excavation.  So the branches form a sort of bower over our heads.  It is sort of like digging in a cathedral.

On Kodiak I can't remember ever digging at a site in the woods.  At the Kashevaroff site on Salonie Creek we had cottonwoods all around, but at that site we also got sun-blasted every afternoon.  At this site it feels cool and green all day long.  Patrick

A deep sea fishing line weight

Trying to block the sunlight for a top of smoke processing feature picture

Interviews for the radio

Peter for scale with the smoke processing feature we uncovered on the second day

Pillar

Yesterday evening was super beautiful.  After Nora's paper route I had planned to take the doggies on a quick hike into the park.  I was tired from running the dig all day, and wanted to do just the bare minimum in regards to doggie exercise.  But Nora begged to go for a hike.  It was so beautiful that we just had to do something.

So after loading up the dogs and convincing Stuey to come along too, we drove up to the top of Pillar Mountain and went for a hike.  Nora raced down the steep green slope towards the ocean and Stuey and I played our usual game of tag.  I followed Nora down the slope and Stuey stayed and watched from on high.  There are a few nice trail on the slope and it is an amazing view.  There were quite a few areas where all the grass is beaten down from people relaxing and making their own bed on the slope.  On hikes I am used to finding deer and elk beds, but these were human beds!

I'm glad Nora convinced me to do more than the usual evening hike!
Patrick

Termination Point before the rain

Last weekend I hiked out Termination Point with the dogs and a visiting archaeologist Peter.  I was kind of amazed to find that the beaver pond in the woods halfway to the point has practically dried up.  Peter and I checked to see if the beaver dams had blown out, and all seemed intact.  So how did the pond lose so much water?  It has not been that dry!

Along the coast I showed him some archaeological sites and we discovered that the point itself looks like it was the site of a pretty substantial early 20th century homestead.  Of course the doggies were totally excited to go on a completely different hike than usual!
Patrick

What happened to the beaver pond?

Peter acting as scale for a historic house depression

Qik'rtangcuk 2018 - it begins!

Crew prior to the start of excavation

Yesterday was the first day of the Community Archaeology dig - the Qik'rtangcuk excavation 2018 begins!

Over the years I have found artifacts in front of the site that look 3 to 7 thousand years old, and even noted a few preserved cod bones eroding out of the deposits.  The site is located on a point abutting Near Island where there is good near shore fishing.  So I have been hoping to find a 3-7 thousand year old Alutiiq cod-processing site.

Last Friday we set out the grid and noticed that there was very little to none of the 1912 Katmai volcanic ash on top of the site.  This ash always caps sites on the road system and its absence could indicate that the site had been badly disturbed in the 20th century.  Uh Oh!

So yesterday when we started to dig in earnest I was very relieved to find that there was actually a thin layer of the ash over the whole site.  Phew!  It looks like much of the ash might have blown away in strong winds soon after the eruption in 1912.  I was also relieved that we found artifacts that look 3-4 thousand years old.  It looks like the very top of the site is from the Early Kachemak period (2500 to 4000 BP) of Alutiiq Prehistory.  Just what I hoped to find and no unpleasant surprises!

Now to dig down into the site and learn what people were doing there 3 to 7 thousand years ago.  What will we find in the older layers?  Patrick

Keith and the artifact of the day - a 3500 year old plummet (fishing lineweight)

Setting out the grid on Friday

We begin to seriously excavate - on the first day!

Chipped basalt point midsection

Molly on the screen