Simple Hunting Camp

 

All last week we excavated at a small site on the shores of Womens Bay.  It is an incredibly ephemeral site - just a hearth with an area of imported beach gravel next to it with a scatter of rocks around them.  There are no built up walls, post holes or dug in foundation.  It looks like a simple hearth that may or may not have been covered with a skin roof where Alutiiq people stayed while they hunted sea mammals.  And it is old - based on the style of hunting implements it looks to be around 5000 years old.

For tools all we have found are broken hunting lances, a whetstone for sharpening them and a pumice abrader for smoothing the lance shaft.  Nothing else.  No chipped stone, no scrapers, no tool manufacturing debris.  This was a place where hunters brought their weapons to hunt sea mammals, replaced broken tips, and maybe put on a finer edge to their points and smoothed the shafts.  They did not spend a lot of time here.

The site is actually a lot like a couple of other nearby sites (the Amak and Kashevaroff sites - click here and here) except those sites were used more frequently, and at various times other activities also took place there.  The site where we are digging now was only used for one season (later in time people did frequently camp there but the lower component represents just one season or so).  The story is much more straight forward and un cluttered by the noise of multiple visits.  

Patrick

whetstone for sharpening slate

pumice abrader - this rock floats!

Nora's bayonet mid section

The 5000 year old hearth

Hearth with scattered gravel beyond it - the square hole is from our 2019 test pit

Another view from the other side

Best of all my daughter Nora joined me for a morning at the dig, and she found a ground slate bayonet mid section.  She enjoyed her visit, and did not want to leave.  This made me very happy.  Later she told me that she enjoyed the banter of all the other archaeologists talking as they excavated.  It also helped that we were finding cool stuff.

Patrick

Nora excavating her square