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| 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
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| Peter carefully collects charcoal that we will use to date the deposits |
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| A red ochre stained living surface |
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| Blades and retouched blades from the earliest component at the site |
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