Sitkinak Archaeology

 

Chase standing by a 2-3 thousand year old house depression

We have been back from the Sitkinak survey for over 2 weeks and I am only now posting the final post.  The one about the archaeology.  We ended up finding 31 new archaeological sites and checking on an additional 7 sites that were already known.  

Of interest we found a great many small sites in the 2-3 thousand year old range, and not all that many of the huge late prehistoric whaling villages that we had expected to find.  Most of the big whaling villages were on the outer coast and have eroded away.  On the outer coasts we observed severe ongoing erosion and at least 3 of the previously reported large whaling villages are now almost entirely gone.  This discovery was somewhat shocking.

Not all the sites are eroding, and we even found a few of the big late prehistoric villages that were not eroding.  But it is clear that outer coast sites are under-represented in our overall sample of sites.

Most of the 2-3 thousand year old sites were fishing camps where the inhabitants used nets to catch fish.  A number of these sites were situated along a creek and lake that we think once had a sizable red salmon run.  Here we found small village sites a long ways away from the current coastline, and the net sinkers and ulus found at the sites indicate that they were catching fish and processing them.

A final observation is that the cows have not damaged the sites very much.  On the nearby island of Chirikof an unmanaged herd of feral cows has over-grazed the landscape and caused severe erosion.  But on Sitkinak the cows are managed and the population kept low, and there are barbed wire fences to keep the cows out of sensitive areas.  The landscape is not over-grazed and trampled.  The cows have caused some erosion but nothing like I saw on Chirikof (click here for some old posts on Chirikof).  

Patrick

Severe erosion - According to old reports there once was a site at this location but it is gone now

house depression truncated by erosion - this one had coal on the house floor

close-up of the coal mixed with the floor deposits of a house (see above)

If you find charcoal in an exposure it's a site

This is a big village site that is just starting to erode into the sea

Netsinkers and an ulu (we did not collect any artifacts)

Prehistoric ceramics and an ulu

One site just had a lot of net sinkers on the beach and nothing else

Severely eroding village site on the outer coast

an adze for planing wood

We found this site almost a 1/2 mile from the sea in a very unlikely spot