Chiniak Survey

Yesterday Molly and I completed the last major portion of the Leisnoi land survey.  All spring and summer we have been surveying their land for archaeological sites.  Our focus has been on finding sites and checking on the conditions of the known sites.  The survey will help Leisnoi protect the cultural resources on their land (click here, here, here, and here for some earlier segments of the survey).  Yesterday we finished the last major portion of the survey - the Cape Chiniak area.  It feels good to be mostly done with the fieldwork aspects of the survey, but we still have to check on a few places that we missed on earlier surveys.

Out at Chiniak we did find one new prehistoric site, and checked on a bunch of other already known prehistoric sites.  But, for the most part, it was all WWII bunkers.  We found that most of the prehistoric sites had been badly damaged by gravel quarrying during WWII.  Another interesting observation is that while the sites were all eroding badly when last visited back in the 1990's they are all largely stable today.  This is good news!  Many of the sites were completely destroyed after the land sank into the sea during the 1964 Great Alaskan  Earthquake, but since then the land has been rebounding out of the sea faster than the sea level has been rising.  Patrick