Long Island Archaeology

If you look carefully you can see the foundation of a prehistoric multi roomed house

It seems like ages and ages ago since Molly and I spent the week doing an archaeological survey out on Long Island.  But it was just 2 weeks ago this morning that we motored on out on a flat calm morning to begin the survey.  It was a productive survey.  In addition to documenting all the material associated with Fort Tidball and WWII (see earlier post), we also discovered an additional 5 prehistoric sites and documented the condition of another 7 Prehistoric and Russian Era sites that were already known about before the survey.  

While we were out there you could almost always hear whales breathing and sea lions grunting - Long Island is a good place to be if you are living off of the land, and based on the number of prehistoric sites it was clearly a focus of Alutiiq settlement.  Hard to believe, but most of the sites have eroded away - I'd guess that well over half of the archaeological sites that once existed on Long Island have since been washed away by the sea.  

We found a few tiny remnants of sites that had mostly eroded away, and you could tell that a great deal was lost to erosion after the land sank almost 6 feet during the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake.  Such earthquakes have happened repeatedly - so over the thousands of years that people lived out there most of the sites have been lost to erosion.  And we only found a couple of sites older than about 3000 years.

While out there we documented ongoing erosion at some sites.  But for the most part, it seems that erosion is stabilizing out on Long Island.  This is because the land is still rebounding up out of the sea after the 1964 earthquake.  Rising sea levels associated with global climate change are not keeping pace with the rising land levels.  Hence the sites are coming out of the water and are stabilizing.  When I was out there in 2002 I documented much more severe ongoing erosion than there is today.

Long Island archaeological sites were badly damaged during the WWII build up and construction of Fort Tidball.  WWII engineers quarried the beaches for gravel to build the roads and use as matrix in their concrete structures.  When they quarried the beach they often quarried into archaeological sites. At many of the sites you could still see the old gravel quarries dug into the sides of the site mounds.  In 2002 I even found some prehistoric artifacts on the gravel roads.   

After the war the quarried beaches continued to erode.  They had to re create a stable beach slope angle - this meant a lot of the landward portions of these beaches eroded away even after the gravel quarrying had been completed.  A local archaeologist, Don Clark, reported that the sites out there were already severely eroded even before the 1964 earthquake exacerbated the process.  

Patrick

This site has been badly damaged by gravel quarrying during WWII

Ongoing coastal erosion damages a site