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| Wesley for scale in the HUGE structure prior to excavation - view north |
The structure we just excavated near Karluk Lake is over 1000 years old (we'll know exactly after we radiocarbon date it). And for its time period it is HUGE. At that time most Alutiiq houses on Kodiak had a single room 3 meters or so across with perhaps a few vestigial side rooms. While they did have sod and dirt roofs they did not have built up sod walls. Clearly they were generally single family dwellings. The structure we excavated had outside dimensions of 28 by 24 meters, a main room over 5M across, at least 3 big side rooms, a sod roof, and sod walls built up over 1 and a half meters from the ground surface. For comparison at the bottom of this post I have pictures and a plan view of a contemporaneous structure we excavated in 2007.
Our huge Karluk Lake structure was at the back of a large village of smaller, normal-sized single family dwellings. Prior to excavation we were wondering if it was so large because it represented either an important person's family house or an early Alutiiq ceremonial 'Qasgiq'. Ceremonial houses or Qasgiq are not supposed to pre date about 600 years ago, but then again big multiroom family houses are also only supposed to post date around 600 years ago as well. So which was it - early qasgiq or early 'important' family house? We chose to excavate it to find out!
And our preliminary findings strongly suggest it was a qasgiq or ceremonial house. The first clue that it was a qasgiq is that the structure floor is covered with patches of red ochre. Red ochre was everywhere, and we also found another yellow pigment and silvery molybdenite. You almost never find molybdenite and red ochre is generally only associated with structures more than 4000 years old. It looks like people in this structure were grinding up A LOT of pigments and probably painting themselves and their ceremonial gear.
Another clue that it is a qasgiq is that we found relatively few artifacts and almost no typical household trash. No manufacturing, fishing, or processing debris. But we did find a lot of finished complete ulus, whetstones, labrets, ulu-shaped scrapers, a couple of oil lamps, and pigment grinders. We did not find a single net sinker which is usually the most common artifact in a site from this time period. The main room had benches along the side and the side rooms did too - there is evidence that a lot of sweat bathing took place in the structure. These activities seem to hint at a ceremonial house to me!
Another big difference between the structure we excavated and a typical 'family' house is that we did not find a hearth surrounded by cooking features, processing features or really any food storage pits of any kind. I believe that all the cooking and food processing took place in the houses closer to the river.
More to come on what we found at the site in future posts but I'll end with a little on just how big of a project it was to build this structure. I carefully measure the elevation of the floors, wall tops, surrounding ground surface and the bottom of a nearby sod and dirt quarry. The sod quarry was over 100 across and had been excavated a meter below the ground surface and even 1/2 a meter into the underlying glacial outwash! The structure floor itself had also been excavated over a meter deep - then the walls built up 1 1/2 meters and the whole thing capped with a sod and dirt roof. The tops of the walls even today tower over 2 meters above the structure's floor. All this represents an enormous amount of dirt moving. And the builders used picks instead of shovels and baskets instead of buckets!
Patrick
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| another view south prior to excavation |
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| if you look carefully you can see our excavation at the very back of a large village away from the river |
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| View of the excavated main room with inside dimensions of a little more than 5 by 5 meters |
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| Main room and some of the already backfilled side rooms |
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| red ochre pigment - this was everywhere on the floors |
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| Molybdenite - this is a very rare pigment in Kodiak sites and we found 4 different samples on the floors |
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| Lots of Birch bark indicates that the structure super structure was made from local black birch trees |
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| A pigment grinder in situ on a sideroom floor |
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| A side room hearth - rocks on wall were all stacked at the near end of hearth |
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| Keith in the entrance tunnel |
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| Plan view of structure with our excavation units - each small square is 20cm (our units each 1 by 1M). |
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| Olga Lakes house from same time period - scale is about twice that of our 2021 excavation (1M=2M) |
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| Olga Lakes house prior to excavation - MUCH smaller and no built up walls |
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| Completed Olga Lakes house excavation |
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| all backfilled! |
