Karluk Lake Archaeology 2022

 

Excavated 'house' - last year's excavation was just to the right in this picture

At the museum a coworker asked me what was the coolest thing we found on the dig and I answered, 'a cluster house with a really long entrance tunnel.' The coworker is used to my tendency to emphasize features over artifacts and assumed I was at it again, and so she replied, 'no, really, the coolest thing.'  And I had to answer again, 'the house'.  And the fact of the matter is that we did not find very many artifacts.  Sure we found a couple of lamps and an incised ground point.  But mostly it was common artifacts like ulus, ulu-shaped scrapers, whetstones, worked slate, and really not a whole lot of anything volume wise. Yet the house was very cool, complete, and it was what we set out to find in the first place (click here for basic goals).

The structure we excavated looks like a Transitional Kachemak 'cluster house' with benches around the main room with a big hearth in the center, two little side rooms connected by tunnels with cold trap 'steps' in them off the corners, and a really long cold trap entrance tunnel.  There was also an un connected room right outside the structure that had a hearth in it.  The structure was capped by a thick sod covered roof, but lacked built up sod walls, and storage or processing features in the main room.

Best of all, the structure is totally different from the qasgiq or ceremonial community hall from the same general time period that we excavated last year.  The 'house' is much smaller and lacks the HUGE built up walls and 'massiveness' of the qasgig (click here for last years post on qasgiq).  It also contained 'normal' house hold artifacts like lots of ulus and worked slate that we did not find in the qasgiq. Comparing last year's structure to the one we excavated this year brings home the point that one is a 'house' and the other a 'dance hall'.  And that is what we hoped to find.

We also tested another structure near last year's qasgiq that we thought would also be another house.  But this one turned out to be something totally different from both the 'qasgiq' and the 'house'.  We only opened up a 3X3 meter block in the structure, and so did not get a really good look.  But we found a floor with a number of large pits dug into the outwash sand below the structure.  It appears to lack a hearth, and I suspect it was a storage building of some sort.  We found both lamps inside this structure.  I can imagine people putting away dried fish into the pits by the light of the 2 lamps.

And now to send in some charcoal from this year's structure to radiocarbon date.  I hope we get a date that is the same as the one we got for the qasgiq!  Fingers crossed!

Patrick

Molly's lamp found in the other structure we excavated

Angus' ulu

The other structure excavation

Ground slate point with incised design - this is a typical find in sites around 800-1200 years old

ground slate arrow tip

red ochre and charcoal stained floor near the hearth in the house 

sub floor pits in the other structure we tested - for storage or processing?

Looking up the long entrance tunnel into the house