Last week I helped conduct an archaeological survey of Long Island. This is 5 mile long island just off of the coast of Kodiak and not the big island associated with NYC! The survey was another segment of the Leisnoi Land survey (click here, here, and here for introduction and earlier survey segments) sponsored by the National Park Service. During WWII Long Island saw a lot of activity and is the location of Fort Tidball - think bunkers and gun emplacements. But Long Island was also a fox farm in the early 20th century and has been a prime location for Alutiiq settlements and hunting camps going back thousands of years. Needless to say, but there was a lot of archaeology for us to find and document!
And find it we did - we found 5 new, previously unknown, prehistoric sites and mapped and documented the condition of another 7 previously known prehistoric and early historic sites (one was an early Russian era brick kiln site). But our main activity was documenting all the structures associated with Fort Tidball. We recorded the locations of everything we found but the most important part was assessing the condition of everything. How is it all holding up after 70 years? I'll be doing more blog posts on the archaeology so stay tuned.
One exciting occurrence was when I got attacked by a nesting goshawk. I was hiking through the forest when suddenly a goshawk started to dive bomb and schreak at me as I dodged to get away. I never saw the nest but I assume that was way he/she attacked me. After a bit he/she stopped and that is when I took the picture below. I continued to walk away when WHAM I saw stars and fell to the ground. The hawk had slammed into my head and took my hat! It was super scary. Patrick
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| Old gun mounts at Deer Point |
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| Some of the nicer beaches had prehistoric village sites behind them |
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| Checking on an old quonset hut where the troops lived during WWII |
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| This is the goshawk that attacked me and stole my hat |
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| Beautiful hiking - with no understory (devilsclub or salmonberry) because of grazing cows |
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| Really GORGEOUS hiking under the trees |
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