A Smaller Pack: 3000 Year-old House

The most exciting thing that we found at Karluk was a huge and virtually complete 3000-year-old house. One of the main reasons we excavated at the site was to see what a 3000-year-old Alutiiq house looked like. I've excavated quite a few houses that are older than about 3500 years old, and also a number that are younger than about 2000 years, but I've never examined one from in between those dates. It is a sort of Alutiiq 'house gap'. It is also when Alutiiq houses went from round with off set hearths to square with hearths in the center of the main room.

So here was a chance to look at a house from the early part of that 'gap'. Based on what I saw on the surface - a square 3 by 3 meter shallow depression - I did not expect the house to be very big. I actually expected a small, fall 'fish camp' house - after all, the site is a ways inland and set beside a lake where salmon spawn in the fall. Then when we started to dig the house just kept on getting bigger and deeper. It was a good thing we had opened up a huge excavation block (7 by 5 meters) in order to get the house and also what was outside the house. The house ended up so big that we actually had very little 'outside the house' by the time we had finished.

We ended up finding an egg-shaped house with inside dimensions of 6 by 4 meters, a foundation dug 50 cm into the ground and capped with a roof insulated by around 30 cm of dirt 'roof sods'. There was also a plank trench around the entire perimeter of the feature where there had been upright planks set against a thick built up wall. When the house had burned down the wall had collapsed in and extended up to a meter over the floor, and we could see the burned wooden super structure. It lacked a formal hearth but did have an offset pit that we think acted as a cooking area. It also seems to have had a sort of ladder entrance on the side of the structure that faced the outlet to the lake. This was not a temporary 'fish camp' type house but something you'd expect to find at a more permanent winter village on the coast.

We began the excavation by digging down into the center of the squarish 3 by 3 meter depression - at first we figured this would be the house foundation. Our plan was to find the floor of the structure and then follow it to the walls. So we dug down to near the bottom of a fired-orange, charcoal rich layer which we figured was the bottom of the burned roof. When the structure burned down it fired the dirt on top of it a bright orange color. It turned out that the squarish 3 by 3 meter area in the center of the structure was just the area capped by only the roof. The floor extended under the walls and it was shocking how much bigger the feature got as we followed the floor back to the foundation walls. We found the charred wall planks directly on the floor - and we also found charred and woven grass matting that had been on the floor (more on this in subsequent post). Since the posts and superstructure had all been charred by the fire we could see quite clearly how the house had been built. We also determined that while the house burning down 3000 years ago was probably a community disaster it was not a tragedy. The inhabitants had all gotten out of the house alive and had grabbed all their stone lamps when they left.

This house took a lot of labor to built. In terms of just excavating the foundation, building up the walls, and capping the roof with dirt and sod I figure the builders moved about 26 cubic meters of dirt (6 roof; 10 for foundation, and 10 for walls). And this without shovels or buckets - the builders were probably using baskets to carry the dirt with sea mammal scapula shovels and rib picks to dig the dirt. It took us archaeologists almost 10 days to dig roughly the same amount using plastic buckets with handles to carry dirt and trowels and shovels of steel to dig. And then there is the labor involved with procuring and preparing all the wood used in the superstructure for the roof and for the planks set up against the walls around the entire inside of the room. There aren't many trees up by the lake and they had to cut them down and work them with stone tools. WOW!

So what did we learn? First of all, the structure that we excavated is a house and not a processing or storage feature of some sort. We know this because we found a variety of common household type artifacts on the floor - things like knives, ulus, abraders, scrapers and adzes. We did not find lots of the rock and charcoal filled pits that you typically find in a smoke processing feature. Nor did we find some sort of specialized tool kit that you'd expect if the feature had a specific purpose.

The most important thing I learned is that Alutiiq people 3000 years ago were building big and very complex houses. A common misconception is that people get more and more 'advanced' through time - houses get bigger and better built as technology get better too. What I've learned - and this is not the first time I've had the lesson drummed into my head - is that people pretty much arrived on the island with a complex technology perfectly suited for the environment and built big houses from the very beginning. The 3000-year-old house we excavated at Karluk Lake is one of the best built and biggest Alutiiq houses I have ever excavated from any time period.

Also the fact that Alutiiq people built this complex of a house up at Karluk Lake suggests that by 3,000 years ago they were living a very settled existence. Families probably had a big house for every stop on their seasonal round. They invested the time in building a big house because they knew they were going to use it every year for a prolonged amount of time.

Finally, we also learned that at 3000 years ago Alutiiq people were still building roundish houses with offset hearths. I still do not know when the switch to squarish houses with central hearths occurred. However, in the 3000 year old house I do see some features common to Alutiiq houses from much later in time. Like the houses from just 200 year or so ago, the 3000-year-old Karluk Lake house had upright planks set all around the outside of the room holding back the wall. Also the square super structure set in middle of main room with sides sloping up to it is also exactly how later houses are built. So there is continuity. Now to find the oldest square house. ... ..

Patrick