A Smaller Pack: Final Survey of 2021

Thursday, November 11, 2021

Final Survey of 2021 - just beat the snow!

A severely eroding site - the erosion has truncated old house depression (note hearth to right of Molly)

On Tuesday Molly and I took a helicopter to Sitkinak Island for the museum's final survey work of the season. And then yesterday it snowed. We just barely beat winter!

We returned to Sitkinak because at the end of our survey in May a bad storm rolled in and cut short our work. We had planned on a final day of surveying in the helicopter and it never happened - until Tuesday.

So Molly and I returned to Sitkinak and helicoptered around the island checking on the places Chase and I did not get to back in May (click here for June post on Archaeology). I was relieved that we did not find a whole lot of new sites - just one or two depending on how you define a 'site'. One of the sites is the military transport plane that crashed into a mountain in the 1950s (photo below). But it seems that Chase and I did not miss any big sites on our foot survey.

On Tuesday Molly and I basically sketch mapped a few of the sites we did not get to in May, and checked on some of the areas that I felt had needed more work (including some remote coves). It was beautiful down there and a gorgeous day for a survey. But COLD. It was quite a dramatic change from what it had been like out there back in May.

Flying around in a helicopter on a stormy winter day also brought home to me just how quickly the sites on Sitkinak are falling into the sea. We saw severe, on-going coastal erosion everywhere we went. And you could see the waves crashing onto the shoreline. The archaeological sites on Sitkinak Island and the south end of the Kodiak Archipelago in general are falling into the sea. The coastal erosion down there is far more severe than it is anywhere else on the archipelago.

Patrick