Back from Shuyak

 

I got back late Sunday from a week long archaeological survey on Shuyak Island.  But I took so many pictures that it took me until today to organize them all and make my first blog post. 

Shuyak Island is a State Park at the far North end of the Kodiak Archipelago.  Nobody lives there, and it is an island with a very convoluted shoreline - all bays, coves, little islands and lots of mud flats at low tide. And then there are the trees - the whole island except the rugged outer coast is thickly forested with Sitka Spruce trees.

It is a 'drowned' coastline in that over time it is slowly sinking, and yet recently it is actually rebounding out of the sea.  The whole Island sank almost a meter and a half in the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake.  This caused massive erosion and much of the coastline is still lined with salt-water killed spruce trees from shortly after the earthquake.  But since the earthquake the island has rebounded rapidly out of the sea - the high tide line is now close to where it was in 1964 before it sank in the earthquake. This means that today there is practically no marine erosion and that new gravel beaches are forming bars in front of the old eroded coastlines. Beaches are building! New spruce trees and grass is now growing on what were beaches immediately after the earthquake.

All this means that it is hard to see and find old sites because there are no site indicators like exposed shell middens or fire-blackened soil to examine.  We actually only found 7 new sites total which is a rather low number.  On my recent survey in Uganik Bay I found 30!  While it is harder to find sites on Shuyak, I also noticed that there are just not as many sites on the landscape either.  I'd land my kayak on little flat-topped points that had protected beaches on either side - such a place would have a 95% chance of being a site in Uganik or Uyak Bays - and find nothing. For some reason, I think fewer people lived on Shuyak relative to the rest of the Archipelago.

While on survey we also checked on and assessed the condition of the already known sites.  We had photos and maps of what these sites looked like in the early 1990s and it is amazing how much they had changed.  The beaches in front of sites that had been 'paved' with reddened, fire-cracked rock and artifacts in the 1990s are now covered with gravel and grass.  Sites that were eroding are now completely vegetated and even have new trees sprouting on them.

Patrick