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| Karluk Lake where we stayed at sunrise |
Last night I returned from a 2 week archaeological excavation near the mouth of Karluk Lake. We excavated a large house that should be around 1000 to 1200 years old. Normally houses from that time period are small single family dwellings with vestigial side rooms and surrounded by pits. But the structure we excavated was at the back of the village and HUGE. It had a main room that measured 5 meters across on the inside and at least 5 large side rooms. I'll discuss the evidence more in a later post but we believe it represents an ancient Alutiiq ceremonial house or Qasgig.
The structure measured 24 by 28 meters on the outside and the main room was excavated almost a meter into the ground. There was a nearby dirt and sod quarry and enough dirt had been removed from it to stack the structure walls up to 1 1/2 meters above the ground surface and to cap all the rooms with a layer of roof sods. That's an enormous amount of dirt to move without shovels or buckets. The Alutiiq builders probably used digging picks made from sea lion ribs and baskets to move all the dirt. I do know that I am exhausted from moving just the dirt we moved while excavating the feature, and we had buckets and shovels!
And then there is the wood structure to hold up the walls and insulating dirt and sod roof. We determined that they used the local black birch trees for wood (we found the bark everywhere between the sod roof and floors). Imagine cutting down and shaping all these live green wood trees with just stone adzes at your disposal?
Anyway, more posts to come. It was a spectacular trip. Lots of big rainbow trout, hikes, bear stories (a couple really good ones), and much, much more to report on what we found during our excavation. The dig was sponsored by the landowner Koniag Inc - Thank you Koniag Inc!
Patrick
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| View of Karluk River from nearby mountain top |
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| the willow trees on the Karluk flats remind me of the African plains |
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| All done with the excavation of the main room - now to backfill. ... |
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| Keith with a rainbow trout he caught |
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| Hiking to the site in the morning with our dig gear |
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| Crew and site about halfway through dig |
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| Alex and an unidentified object we found - we found 2! |
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| Hiking back to camp at the end of the day |
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| mapping the main room of the house |
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| etched design on a slate point we found - a caribou? |
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| Nearing the end of the dig - we opened up units in all of the side rooms |
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