What we found on Shuyak 2025

 

Tiny oil lamp

We got back from our Shuyak survey 2 weeks ago and I am only now getting around to my final Shuyak blog post.  It was a successful survey. We found 16 new sites, checked on and documented an additional 18 sites, and made some important discoveries. We may well have found both the oldest site on Shuyak and the largest village there.  The old site was associated with blades and other chipped stone tools generally only found in sites older than 7000 years. The big village consisted of 9 large multiroom house depressions and was 150 meters long.  Close to 200 people probably once lived in that village, and it is the biggest village I've seen on Shuyak.

Another interesting discovery was a village around 1000 years old associated with what appears to be a qasgiq or ceremonial house.  It looks just like the one we excavated at Karluk in 2021 (click here for post).

Weirdest find was at another large village where I documented a house depression where a bear had recently cached an entire porpoise carcass. The bear had dug up and damaged the insides of the depression to bury the carcass.

This year's survey reinforced what we learned on last year's survey (Click here for post). Shuyak is characterized by a 'drowning coastline', and, while the island sank and experienced severe erosion after the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake, it has rebounded out of the water since then and the coastline is stable. Today there is so little erosion that it makes it difficult to find sites. But past erosion also makes it hard to find really old sites.

All that said, I also do think the island was less heavily utilized by people in the past than in other regions of the archipelago.  

Philip and I have developed an informal 'site likelihood' index to characterize how attractive a particular spot would have been for people to create a site.  Things like flat ground, well drained soils, water, 2 access beaches, nearby resources like anadromous streams, bird rookeries, cod fishing, or sea lion haul outs, and other harder to define qualities all add up to make a place more or less attractive for settlement. On Shuyak a lot of very attractive places did not have sites on them.  In places like Kiliuda, Uyak or Uganik Bay even the least attractive places are associated with sites - if there is a beach there is pretty much a site. Not so on Shuyak.  On Shuyak there were a couple of spots that I gave an 8/9 out of 10 for attractiveness and there was no site.

I think this indicates that the region was just less intensively utilized than other areas of the archipelago.  Maybe the environment is not quite as rich, or maybe the weather is just a bit more extreme. I did notice that many of the places we landed lacked soil - it had been blown away by the high winds. Nonetheless, Shuyak is a beautiful place and has a rich and long archaeological history. We found some enormous villages and evidence for at least 7000 years of occupancy. It's just that the region was a little less intensively used than other parts of the archipelago.

Patrick

fire cracked rock exposed on a beach - this is a good indicator for a site

An old collapsed cabin

eroding faunal midden - the bones are the remains of past meals

A blade - you only find these distinct tools in sites older than 7000 years

An exposed hearth on a beach - I did not think that this one was old enough to qualify as a site

This depression looks like it might be a qasgiq

An outcrop of the red chert used to make stone tools

a ground slate arrowhead

Large multiroom house depression

a 'grooved' splitting maul used to make the planks used in house construction

chipped stone point and ground slate ulu

A scatter of stone tools found on the beach by a site that eroded after the 1964 subsidence event - this is a really old site