Old Dirt – New Thoughts

Stacy and Tamara identifying shellfish.

The students in my lab class are pushing hard to finish their projects. They’re all working on materials from Aniakchak – mostly the 2007 collections. They’re producing the first real data from these materials. I have students analyzing shellfish, mammal bones, chipped stone waste flakes, chipped stone tools, and bone tools. Other students are working on the catalog data and illustrations. It’s my favorite part of the class. I have 16 research assistants – all generating data and addressing questions. It’s a blast.

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Art is one of the more exciting finds in archaeology and one of the more challenging materials to interpret. Our excavations at Aniakchak have produced a small, but intriguing assemblage of artwork and decorated objects.

One of my favorite artifacts from our last field season is this small face. It is obviously broken in half, but the face still resonates a kind of quiet presence. I’m not sure whether this object served a utilitarian purpose. It appears to have been a hollow tube made from cancellous sea mammal bone. Pronounced polish on the bottom edge of this artifact is suggestive of use-wear.

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^{Historic distribution of southwest Alaskan native groups (from Dumond 2005)}

Aniakchak is very near to the historic boundary between Unangan (Aleut) and Supiaq or Alutiiq (Pacific Eskimo) peoples. One of our research goals is to determine in what ways this boundary may have changed in the past. What we want to know is who lived in Aniakchak Bay? Were they more closely related to the people of the Aleutian Islands or the Kodiak Archipelago, or was their culture an amalgamation of regional traditions. In what ways did they interact with their neighbors to the east and west? Was there a sharp boundary between peoples or was there a lot of trade and contact? Did these borderlands change throughout the occupation of the site, or did they remain relatively stable and permanent? To answer these questions we look at everything from houses and harpoons to carved ivory and even quartz crystals.

^{Quartz crystal from Koniag house}

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Since we have ancient masks as a recent topic on this blog, I decided to continue my Aniakchak field reports by highlighting one of this season’s more spectacular finds – a portion of a miniature ivory mask. It came from one of the dense midden deposits (Strat Layer VII) eroding out of the headlands overlooking Aniakchak Bay. We have not dated this deposit directly, but we believe it belongs to the 1300 BP occupation. (more…)

I’m back from Aniakchak. I arrived in St. Paul yesterday morning after 12 hours of travel. (We essentially went from Aniakchak Lagoon to Minnesota without stopping – except to change planes). It was/is a great field season (Ross, Gina, Caleb, and Kelly are still at the site working for another 10 days).

We found some interesting features including this nice big pile of fire- cracked rock and wood.

Gina excavating F103.

As usual, we excavated a lot of shell midden – enough to keep all my Hamline archaeology students busy for the next year sorting and cataloging. We made several interesting discoveries – which I’ll write more about over the next couple of weeks. I need to first take care of my emails, phone messages, and all the dreaded University paper work. I wish I were back in Aniakchak right about now.

Can this snail tell us about climate change? We think it can. We think studying Aniakchak Bay’s modern snails and those we recovered archaeologically will tell us something about the intensity of wave action (or storminess) 1500 years ago compared to today. Storminess and exposure to waves would have been an environmental condition important to the Aniakchak Bay villagers since their economy was so heavily focused on the harvest of maritime resources. We hope that our analysis of snail biomechanics will give us insight into the climatic conditions faced by the Aniakchak villagers during their occupation and especially during the abandonment of their home on the bay.

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I have not posted one of these “finds” for a while. We’ve recently shifted our lab work from sorting shell midden to cataloging, so we’re starting to handle a lot of unusual objects. This “hook” thingy is made of sea mammal bone and clearly part of a composite tool. The two triangular parts are nicely finished and appear designed to extend out from the tool, while the center piece is where this artifact would have been lashed or fitted into the larger object. The triangles have several faint lines scratched onto their surfaces. The lines are so haphazardly inscribed that I don’t think they are meant to be decorative, but they also don’t seem to be functional, nor are they usewear. Any ideas of what kind of tool this object is from? I’m guessing possibly part of a harpoon, boat hook, or kayak frame.

 Bone artifact from Aniakchak.

I have posted on the Aniakchak Wiki excerpts from my field journal. Katie Johnson Ringsmuth, an historian with the Park Service, asked me to put this document together last summer. She’s interested in recording the recent experiences of scientists and researchers that work in the park as part of her park history.

I’m not sure whether my journal excerpts have any historical or literary significance. But, I have always been interested in reading other people’s published field journals because of my fascination with the scientific process. So I offer my own contribution for readers with similar interests. (Note, I carefully censored all reference to that most troublesome member of my crew – JAG- so you won’t find any of my lengthy and justifiable rants about this person in my journal excerpts. Sorry for those of you who were hoping to get the true story behind the canned oranges.) 

My Lab class has finished their projects. You can see their reports in our Aniakchak Wiki. The mammal group found some interesting results when they compared the skeletal parts recovered from fox and from sea otter. As their pie charts show, the identified sea otter elements are from all parts of the body, where as the fox elements are predominately either mandibles, metapodials, or phalanges. That is, heads and feet for the fox versus entire carcasses for the sea otter. One interpretation of these patterns is that the inhabitants were primarily hunting fox for furs (which they brought back to the site with the feet and head attached), while the sea otters were brought back whole (presumably as food). We need to pursue this analysis a little further, but I thought this preliminary result very intriguing.

Sea otter and fox identified elements (Illustration made by Amy Branden).

     My Archaeology Lab Techniques students are finishing up some great projects. I have groups working on the bifaces, chipped stone flakes, mammal bones, shellfish, bone tools, and flotation samples – so we have a lot of work happening right now. The students will be posting the results of their analyses on our new Aniakchak Wiki. Everyone should check it out. I’m expecting some interesting data.

My archaeology lab class has been busy cataloging these last couple of weeks. They had two artifacts from Aniakchak that I find particularly interesting.

One “find” is a miniature bifacial “point”. It’s even smaller than the one I highlighted from this summer. I’ve seen small points like this one described in archaeological reports as “toys”. I suspect, though, that the Aniakchak miniature points are functional tools because we have so many (and virtually no larger points).

 Miniature biface of black chert.

The other find is a piece of copper sheet rolled into a tube. I’m assuming it is a “bead”. We found this bead near the site surface, but I believe it is native copper and from a precontact context.

 Copper bead.

We just submitted an abstract for a poster session in the 2007 SAA meetings.  Our poster will present our taphonomic studies of the shell and bone accumulations found with the eagle nests and otter den in Aniakchak Bay. Our goal for this analysis is to identify the distinctive characteristics of these non-human created ”middens”.

 Ross collecting eagle nest fauna from abandoned nest at Elephant Head Point.

One intriguing observation we made in the field came when we watched the eagles at SUT-027 bringing salmon up to the nest. Twice we noticed that the eagles first removed (ate?) the head off the fish before carrying the rest of the body up to their fledgling. I don’t know why they removed the head (perhaps to lessen the weight they had to carry), but if they did this regularly then their “midden” would have the same salmon body part pattern as human sites where only the salmon fillets are transported from fish camps to the main villages.

  Headless pink salmon dropped by eagle below nest at SUT-027.

We were inspired to undertake this project in part by the 2001 article in American Antiquity by Erlandson and Moss where they discuss the many different creatures that are potentially involved in forming coastal faunal assemblages. In their article they provide data they collected on an eagle nest in southeast Alaska. I think our data should be a very interesting addition, especially since we have collections from “ground” nests. I’d like to hear about any other reports of eagle or otter fauna.

 Haden just found this small chalcedony point while sorting  shell midden from Aniakchak. We’ve found a couple dozen of these tiny points and hardly any larger bifaces giving the Aniakchak chipped stone assemblage a very different look compared to our Unimak and King Salmon materials.

We have spent most of this summer sorting materials from the 2005 field season at Aniakchak. This week we cleaned and “rhoplexed” this interesting bone “knife”. (Rhoplex is an acrylic consolidant useful for preserving ivory, bone and antler artifacts.) I’m not sure of this artifact’s function, but it reminds me of a butter knife. We found it on the house floor in an area where we also recovered a lot of sewing needles. Any ideas on how it may have been used?