A Smaller Pack: Old Stuff

Sunday, July 29, 2018

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