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| Molly documents a severely eroding site - note hearth in profile |
As I said in my first Ugak post, we found 29 new archaeological sites and documented another 12 already known sites. That's a lot of sketch maps and notes! In addition to making a sketch map of each site we also recorded if it was eroding and other types of site damage, the intensity of the vegetation growing on the site, and made a ball park guess about the site's age.
What's interesting is that like on the Kiliuda Bay survey we found almost as many sites older than about 1000 years ago as we did more recent sites. This indicates to me that the archaeological record in Kiliuda Bay is pretty intact. Not too many of the sites have been obliterated by erosion. For comparison, when I surveyed on Afognak Island where there is more erosion I rarely found sites older than about 1000 years. On Afognak the older sites have mostly eroded into the sea.
In Ugak Bay we also found some HUGE villages. I think the biggest had 33 house depressions, and another had 27 depressions. Those are big villages and at about 18 people per house (early Russian censuses used 18 people per house) both of those villages had around 500 people living in them. Of course the 2 villages were not occupied at the same time, but 500 people in one village indicates that Ugak Bay was pretty densely occupied. There were more people living in the bay 500 years ago than there are now.
Another cool discovery was that we found a number of the villages and Russian American Company outposts mentioned in Russian historic accounts. On a Russian American Company map from 1849 we found both the villages depicted on it, and their layouts closely matched what was depicted on the map.
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| House pits at an early Koniag Tradition village |
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| We found the top two villages shown on this map |
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