Thursday I got back from a week long archaeological survey of Sitkinak Island. This was the last extended survey of the year. We like to do our surveys in the spring before everything gets covered with vegetation, and it has gotten pretty green of late. On this survey we used a helicopter to get there and to survey some hard to reach locations, and then hiked about 40 miles over 5 days to cover the rest of the coastline.
Chase and I started at the Northwest corner and, camping along the way, ended up at the Northeast corner of the Island. We carried 8 days of food and at first our packs were pretty heavy but they got lighter and lighter every day.
There is a well-managed herd of cows on the island and they keep the grass short. They also create nice hiking trails. So the hiking was super easy. Another topographic feature conducive to hiking is that all of the river valleys were created by roaring glacier rivers and have broad flat bottoms. But most of the time we hiked the beaches. The beaches are pretty remote and we found a lot of glass balls along the way. We actually kept a running tally between the number of sites we found and the glass balls. For a long time the glass balls were ahead, but a run on sites at the end put the archaeological sites on top. Final tally was 30 sites to 24 glass balls.
So in total we found 30 new archaeological sites and checked on another 7 previously known sites. A number of the previously known sites had already been completely eroded away be coastal erosion. In blogposts to come I'll report in more depth on the hiking, animals we saw, the archaeology and other aspects of the survey. So stay tuned.
Patrick
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| The sun is setting on the same point seen in the first photo as seen from the other direction! |
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