tdp

~Shelly

Also the Koniag material down on Chirikof was very weird for us Kodiak based archaeologists. There was an inordinate number of basalt tools. As Don Clark put it, ‘you got to think what Kachemak and Koniag would look like if they used basalt instead of slate.’ A surprising number of slate tools and kodiak greenstone (meta tuff) tools too. The abundance of basalt made everything look a little ‘Aleutian’ to us Kodiak based archaeologists.

Thinking about you ‘Lower Alaska Peninsula’ archaeologists looking for Kodiak style houses got me to wondering whether we’d recognize Aleutian style houses on Kodiak. I guess if I found a really long house depression with no obvious entrance tunnel I’d start to wonder. Or a house with stone walls (I’m envious of the Margret Bay and Amaknak Bridge site houses with walls of stone – certainly easier to excavate and photograph than houses with walls built of stacked sods like we find on Kodiak).

Finally – Siberia would be awesome. Let’s go.
Patrick

Apparently quartz crystals are found with these houses on the Alaska Peninsula just like they are on Kodiak. My crew members call them “booty crystals” after I told them that the Aleut (?) young men used to give them to their girl friends. Supposedly they would kayak for hundreds of miles to bring back the most impressive crystals they could find. Of course I don’t remember my reference, and I’ve probably made most of this up. My students liked the story, though, and would yell “booty crystal” every time they found anything remotely quartz-like.

Very interesting about the Koniag houses on Chirikof. I agree that Aniakchak and Chirikof were probably culturally very similar throughout most of prehistory. We’ll have to do some kind of comparative analysis at some point to really document this relationship.

Regarding your thoughts on AK Peninsula Thule, I generally agree. I use the cumbersome “Thule/Koniag” appellation in this post because I’m withholding judgment, but I’m largely convinced that at least Aniakchak was a Koniag occupation (that is, ancestral Alutiiq). What to call Dumond’s “Bluff Phase” is something we could debate.

Of greater importance is your point that the “Eskimo” language/origins question remains one of the biggest unanswered questions in archaeology. Obviously there is good evidence for at least part of the story coming from the Bering Straits region, just like there is for Kodiak and the upper Alaska Peninsula. Maybe where we really need to look is on the Chukchi Peninsula (as Owen Mason suggests). Maybe you and I should take next summer off from digging along the north Pacific and see what we can find in Siberia. I’m sure our families and employers wouldn’t mind.

Patrick writes — I loved your Koniag house, and I’ll add that the later houses at Settlement Point were full of quartz crystals while the earlierst house was not. They seem to be a Late Koniag diagnostic (which matches your dates). I read somewhere that quartz crystals were put inside of rattles but I can not remember the reference. The house map in your notes looks just like what I’ve been drawing over and over again on our surveys along the rivers at the south end of Kodiak.

One thing I realized after reading your story is how important it is to do your survey work early before the grass and pushki grow tall enough to obscure the house depressions. Lately, we’ve been doing our surveys in late April and early May because we found that the vegetation was often already too tall by late May (this year we got a little burned by a late spring and the ground was still frozen which made tests pits darn near impossible to dig). In late april the housepits are very clearly defined and you can even see internal features like hearths, cold trap tunnels to siderooms and benches. Kachemak houses are less clearly defined and more difficult to map because they are almost always capped by thick roof sods (which look like mixed and mottled ashes).

Two other points that I wanted to make. One we did find clear Koniag style houses on Chirikof – at at least 3 Konaig villages existed out there. And one dated to around 500 years ago. Another locality in the
borderlands.

Finally – I hate the word ‘Thule’ for anything related to the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak. I know I know – I’m big into the ‘in situ’ development for the Koniag on Kodiak, so perhaps I’m biased (aren’t we all). But one thing I am wondering – why don’t the Yupik speak ‘Thule’ or Inupiaq? Seems to me the Thule never got south of Norton Sound. I bet the Norton and Kachemak spoke an identical language closely related to Yupik and Alutiiq. Also even Don Dumond believes the ‘Koniag’ houseform developed first on Kodiak (he sees it being adopted on the Ak Peninsula as a sort of backwash thing). So really it is a Koniag houseform. Now Allen McCartney’s whale bone house from the Lower Ak Peninsula is a different thing entirely.
–Patrick

Here’s Patrick’s comment – “We’ve really nailed the evolution of the Alutiiq House in the last few years. Around 1500 years ago it was single room kachemak houses with storage pits scattered all over the village (like the Uyak site). Then you see single room kachemak houses with pits close by surrounding it (found a lot of these on survey and they date to around 1200 BP). Then you get small multiroom HP’s with roof sods and kachemak features – and still have some pits by each house (like the one we excavated this year at Olga Lake – also Horseshoe Cove on Uganik Island) – date to around 900 BP. Then they move on to the Settlement point style – no roof sods over the main room, and clean sleeping rooms for families with all the storage in the main room (600 BP) (the siderooms are basically single room houses attached to a common room). Later the multiroom houses get more formal, drop the cold trap tunnels to the siderooms, and you see siderooms used for storage. It’s a pretty clean story.