A Smaller Pack: Karluk Lake Archaeology 2024

Sunday, September 8, 2024

Karluk Lake Archaeology 2024

Site prior to excavation - you could not see the house pits at all!

Last summer the plan for our Karluk Lake excavation had been to excavate portions of 2 structures - one a normal house and the other what we hoped would be a qasgiq or community house. We had mapped the site way back in 2009 (see below), and it seemed to represent a late prehistoric village of 4 multiroom houses with a large single room structure on a knoll at the upriver end. The single room structure had a huge built up wall and we interpreted it (based on location and how different it was from the other structures) as the village community house or qasgiq.

In 2021 and 2022 (click here and here for posts) we had excavated 2 structures from a nearby 1000-year-old village - one a qasgiq and the other a normal house - and the comparison between the two had confirmed that the qasgiq was indeed a community house (qasgiq full of ceremonial gear and exotic material while house full of run of the mill domestic artifacts). Last summer we had hoped to do the same thing with the 2 structures in the far younger village.

It did not work out that way. Our 'qasgiq' ended up being far older than the adjacent multiroom house and both structures had extremely thin floors. So no 'qasgiq' and really very little to compare between the two. It seems that both structures had been used for such a short time period that very little had been left behind on their floors.

But then as so often happens in archaeology our unexpected discoveries ended up very exciting indeed! We found far older stuff underneath both structures, and in our tests in the midden by the river as well. We have not radiocarbon dated anything yet, but it appears that Alutiiq people have been living on that spot for the last 7000 years. The locality has been the focus of a great deal of activity for thousands of years - far more activity than we expected.

Under the single room house on the knoll we also found another far older structure that very much resembles the 3000-year-old house that we excavated in 2023 (click here for post). Like that house, the foundation was deeply dug into the glacial till, it had roof sods, a plank trench around the edge, and seemed to have had sods intentionally put onto the floor to soften the ground. One heavily built 3000-year-old house is somewhat unique, but two starts to form a pattern, and is another indication that far more was going on up at Karluk Lake in the distant past than we once thought.

We also found numerous indications that Alutiiq people had used the area prior to 4000 years ago. Mostly we found time diagnostic artifacts (more on this in subsequent post to come) like saw-and-snap slate (generally older than 4000 years ago) and even a utilized blade (typical of 7000 years ago). However, the locality has been intensively built over by subsequent inhabitants and when building their houses they stripped the area down to glacial till for sod blocks to build their walls and cap their roofs. We had a hard time finding 'in situ' and undisturbed deposits from the oldest occupations at the site. The only place where we found them was at the bottom of the midden in front of the site, and at the very bottom underneath the multiroom house. There, we found a pit that had had a hearth at the bottom surrounded by rocks, and had been capped with blocks of sod.

In any case, the really old stuff has piqued my interest. Now we need to find and excavate more of it where it has not been disturbed by later occupations. What were people doing up at the lake possibly even before the salmon runs were fully established?

Patrick