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.

They’ll be posting the results of their studies on the Aniakchak Wiki. Check it out and see what they have to say. I’ve been telling this class that they have to do better than the 2006 class – analyzing larger samples, creating more stunning graphics, and writing better reports. The Aniakchak Wiki will have both the 2006 and 2008 reports, so everyone will be able to see if this year’s class really does ‘kick butt’ on the 2006 class as they claim.

CS Tool Group – Matthew, Josh, and Emily

What I’m most curious to learn from this year’s analyses are some of the differences between occupations at Aniakchak. This year’s class is focusing on a single 1 x 1 meter excavation (N462E455) that produced almost 2 meters of cultural deposits. The upper component started with a Koniag house floor (Strat II). Immediately below this floor was a thick midden deposit (Strat III) that probably dates to about 1200 years ago. About 80 cm below this midden is a very rich deposit (Strat VIII) that included a lot of shell midden, micro debitage, and burned bone. It looks this deposit could include a house floor or similar context. This deep deposit produced some fiber tempered ceramic sherds, suggesting a Norton tradition occupation dating around 1700 years old. Another 20 to 50 cms below the Norton component is another relatively rich deposit. This basal component had spongy wood preserved and a scattered midden. We haven’t dated this component, but it may predate the Norton component by a couple of hundred years.

I’m excited to see what the students have to say about these different components. It’s sometimes hard to tell anything when we’re digging. There is just so much blue mussel shell and fish bone that it’s hard to pick up any other patterns. This is why I always get pumped up when we get to this stage in the lab work. After hours and hours of sorting and cataloging, we’re finally going to find out what we have discovered.

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.

In an earlier post, I argued that the excavated art assemblage from Aniakchak differed from other published assemblages from the region. I’m less convinced of this claim the more I study the matter. The Aniakchak assemblage has strong parallels to the contemporary Kachemak tradition artwork, particularly the assemblage from the Uyak site on Kodiak Island occupied around AD 1-1100. Both Uyak and Aniakchak have small, ivory maskettes, animal figurines (including whale and caribou imagery), and other decorative pieces (Heizer 1956).

The maskettes from Aniakchak include this half face from the 2005 field season. This ivory maskette reminds me somewhat of the Phantom of the Opera mask. Recovered from a house floor occupied around AD 630, this perfect little carving is only 16.2 mm tall and 2.5 mm thick. The back side of the maskette is curved as if intended to be worn by a doll. Upon close inspection of the facial features I can see pronounced cheeks and shallow nostril holes. Faint tool marks suggest the face was polished, especially compared to the reverse side of the ‘owl face’ described in an earlier post. The hole above the left eye on the ‘half-face’ maskette indicates this artifact was attached to something else. A nearly identical hole can be observed on the maskette from Uyak. A somewhat similar maskette with suspension hole from Amchitka Island is illustrated in Lydia Black’s classic study: Aleut Art: Unangam Aguqaadangin, demonstrating these ivory maskettes had a wide distribution in the north Pacific (2003: Figure 46).

It’s interesting that the Aniakchak half-face maskette was unbroken and found on a house floor, while the other two ‘ancient faces’ from the site were both broken and recovered from midden deposits. As a small collection, the three faces display some of the variability in the Aniakchak artwork, with the ivory half-face maskette showing detailed work and careful finishing. The broken bone face is more simplistic, but also made of a porous material that limited the carver’s ability to add fine detail.

I plan to expand on these ideas regarding technique and condition, including looking at tool marks, use-wear, and breakage patterns when I discuss the remaining ivory pieces from Aniakchak. I’ve been inspired by the work of Randall White (2003, 2006) and his studies of ivory carvings from the European paleolithic. His strategy is to combine the study of iconography and context with a chaîne opératoire approach. Although our ability to interpret the symbolic meaning behind the ivory carvings from Aniakchak is limited, I’m hoping a thick description of these objects, following White’s approach, will lead to insight into the cultural practices associated with this artwork.

Ultimately, I think the most interesting aspect of the Aniakchak art assemblage are the similarities to artwork from the neighboring Kodiak Archipelago and Aleutian Islands. The cultural groups living throughout this part of the north Pacific differed substantially in many aspects of their utilitarian cultures, but apparently shared aspects of their artistic traditions. The ‘ancient faces’ of Aniakchak are a part of these traditions.

Update – Check out the artifact photographs from the Hot Springs Village Site (just across and down the Penninsula from Aniakchak) if you want to see more ‘ancient faces‘.

References

Black, Lydia T. 2003. Aleut Art: Unangam Aguqaadangin. Second Edition ed. Virginia Beach, VA: The Donning Company Publishers.

Heizer, Robert F. 1956. Archaeology of the Uyak Site, Kodiak Island, Alaska. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

White, Randall. 2006. The Women of Brassempouy: A century of research and interpretation. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 13, (4): 250-303.

———. 2003. Prehistoric art: The symbolic journey of mankindHarry N. Abrams.

^{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}

Our excavations indicate that the “Eskimo/Aleut” cultural boundary did shift over time. We are still piecing together the early part of the story, but by 300 years ago our site was definitely occupied by people from the east, people with a distinct material culture related to a Thule, or more likely a Koniag archaeological tradition (the ancestors of today’s Alutiiq people).

^{ANIA 4529 – Green slate endblade found in 2004}

We had a glimpse of this Thule/Koniag occupation our first season of excavation when we found a ground slate harpoon endblade – a tool diagnostic of late prehistoric Eskimo culture. Our next season we excavated a large, “outdoor” hearth with associated slate tools, a copper bead, and activity areas belonging to the Thule/Koniag occupation. Two radiocarbon dates indicate this hearth was in use from approximately 250 to 350 years ago. The hearth and surrounding material remains were the first solid evidence of an actual Thule/Koniag occupation in this part of the Alaska Peninsula. For us a very exciting result for the 2005 field season.

This summer we found the clincher – a Thule/Koniag multi-room house. Writing that we “found” this house is a bit of a misstatement. We have known of this “house” or at least this housepit (a surface depression that marks where a semi-subterranean sod house once stood) from the original site survey. Unable to clearly see through the dense vegetation, however, the survey archaeologists recorded two depressions, one circular and one somewhat rectangular in shape (Features 18 and 19 on their map).

^{Original site map from VanderHoek and Myron (2004)}

I have been suspicious of these features from my first visit to the site, but have always been too focused on other site areas to give them any serious attention. This year we finally cleared away the surrounding vegetation for a closer look.

Although difficult to see in photographs, my field notes give some sense of what we found. Instead of two separate depressions, this area contained a complex feature with a relatively large main room off of which radiated five smaller rooms (and an entryway) like spokes on a wheel.

These multi-room houses are widespread throughout the Kodiak Archipelago and upper Alaska Peninsula beginning as early as AD 1100 and continuing in use up into the 1800s (see Bundy et al. 2005; Dumond 1998, 2004; Knecht and Jordan 1985; Saltonstall et al. 2002). Historically these houses were used by two or more families. They would share the central room for cooking and other daily activities. The side rooms they used as bedrooms, store rooms, and even for saunas.

House style is often an important ethnic marker. We believe this observation is especially true for the last 2000 years of southwest Alaskan history. All cultural groups living in the region built semi-subterranean pit houses, but the style of their houses differed substantially. Aniakchak’s multi-room house was built in the Koniag style. I believe it is our best evidence that a community of Alutiiq ancestors (archaeological Koniag) lived in Aniakchak Bay around 300 years ago.

National Park Service archaeologists report of four other multi-room house pits (one on the north side of Aniakchak Bay and three on two sites in Kujulik Bay just west of Aniakchak) found during their 1997-2000 surveys in the park (VanderHoek and Myron 2004). Three radiocarbon dates from these features range between 300 and 500 years old, suggesting these three houses also belong to the Thule/Koniag archaeological tradition. It is worth noting, however, that the NPS archaeologists found no ground slate endblades and only one slate knife diagnostic of a Thule/Koniag occupation during their four seasons of survey and testing in Aniakchak park. From their perspective, the last 500 years of prehistory in the park remained relatively obscure and unknown.

So, Aniakchak and apparently Kujulik Bays have the westernmost Thule/Koniag houses on the Alaska Peninsula. Were these scattered four houses built by people living on the very edge of the Alutiiq world? It seems likely given what we know about the archaeology of the Chignik region further west (Dumond 1992; Maschner 2004). On-the-other-hand, if I could walk over a Koniag multi-room house for two summers without recognizing it, perhaps we just need to take a closer look at the Chignik sites.

For now, we have a large collection of artifacts and faunal remains from our Aniakchak excavations waiting for analyses. I’m very curious to see what these analyses will tell us about this Koniag community and what life was like for them living on the borderlands.

References

Bundy, B. E., D. M. Vinson and D. E. Dumond (2005) Brooks River Cutbank: An Archeological Data Recovery Project in Katmai National Park. University of Oregon Anthropological Papers no. 64. Dept. of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene.

Dumond, D. E. (1992) Archaeological Reconnaissance in the Chignik-Port Heiden Region of the Alaska Peninsula. In Contributions to the Anthropology of Southcentral and Southwestern Alaska. R.H. Jordan, F. de Leguna, and A.F. Steffian, ed., Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska 24(1-2): 89-108: Fairbanks.

Dumond, D. E. (1998) The Archaeology of Migrations: Following the Fainter Footprints. Arctic Anthropology 35(2):59.

Dumond, D. E. (2003) Archaeology on the Alaska Peninsula: The Leader Creek Site and its Context. University of Oregon Anthropological Papers no. 60. Dept. of Anthropology and Museum of Natural History, University of Oregon, Eugene.

Dumond, D. E. (2005) A Naknek chronicle: Ten Thousand Years in a Land of Lakes and Rivers and Mountains of Fire. U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, Katmai National Park and Preserve, Washington, DC.

Knecht, R. A., R. H. Jordan (1985) Nunakakhnak : An Historic Koniag Village in Karluk, Kodiak Island, Alaska. Arctic Anthropology 22(2):17-35

Maschner, H. D. G. (2004) Traditions Past and Present: Allen McCartney and the Izembek Phase of the Western Alaska Peninsula. Arctic Anthropology 41(2):98-111.

Saltonstall, Patrick G., Robert Kopperl, and Amy F. Steffian (2002) Smokehouses and Dwellings: Structures at an Interior Fish Camp, Kodiak Island Alaska. Paper presented at the 29^th Annual Meeting of the Alaska Anthropological Association, Anchorage, AK

VanderHoek, Richard and Rachel Myron (2004) Cultural Remains from a Catastrophic Landscape: An Archeological Overview and Assessment of Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve. United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve.

I found this object in the last hours of my last day on the site, so it was a very gratifying way to end my time at Aniakchak. The artifact is broken making it a little difficult to say exactly what it represents. I believe it is a carving of a face (some say an owl’s face) broken just below the nose. It seems like you can even discern faintly scratched eyebrows. It has a hole drilled through from front to back at the top of the head. This hole would have allowed the object to be suspended like a pendant. The hole also would enable one to tie it to or otherwise affix it to another object (possibly a doll or figurine).

Jeanne Schaaf, a National Park Service archaeologist working with us in Aniakchak, thinks this object may have been a labret. Neither of us, though, can remember seeing any similar labrets in any archaeological reports for the region. In fact, this object along with the other carved ivory pieces from Aniakchak are largely unique for the Southwest Alaskan archaeological record. Aniakchak’s occupants, at least at 1300 BP, seem to have had an artistic tradition that differed from their contemporaries in the eastern Aleutians to their west and the Kodiak Archipelago to their east. When asking the question “Who lived in Aniakchak Bay 1300 years ago?”, analysis of the artwork may ultimately provide one of the clearest answers.

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.

The gastropod Nucella (dogwhelk) is a carnivorous snail found in rocky intertidal zones where it feeds on barnacles and blue mussel. Its a tough life. Nucella living on exposed coastlines are hammered by heavy surf. During low tide the snails face danger from the dry air and burning sun. Returning ocean waters at high tide bring other invertebrate carnivores, ones that consider Nucella a fine meal. These various threats put conflicting demands on Nucella. A larger opening (aperture) enables the snail to better withstand heavy surf by hanging on to its rocky home with a larger “foot”, but the opening is also where the snail is most vulnerable to attack from other carnivores. Evolutionary forces over time have shaped the snail’s shell to meet these different threats.

Zoologists have noticed an interesting fact about Nucella. At least some populations have morphological plasticity (Palmer 1992). That is over time these populations can adjust their shell’s shape to better protect against the specific threats found in their portion of the coast, so different populations of the same species of Nucella have different shaped shells depending on their particular environmental location. This morphological plasticity also allows these populations to adjust when the local conditions change over time. They respond, for example, to climatic shifts that result in increased or decreased storminess by shrinking or enlarging the size of their aperture.

Paleoclimatologists and archaeologists have analyzed Nucella assemblages dating to different time periods to help reconstruct climate change (Andrews et al. 1985). The basic method is fairly simple. They use the ratio of the aperture height to total shell length. Relatively large apertures are associated with high wave energy environments and small apertures with low wave energy environments. They use the ratios recorded for modern Nucella from different wave environments to interpret any archaeologically documented variations.

To my knowledge this approach has not been attempted by any Alaskan archaeologists. So last fall I asked one of my lab students, Shelly Love, to conduct a pilot study of the Aniakchak Nucella from one set of stratified midden samples. She found 42 shells complete enough to measure from 7 shell midden lenses. Although based on a small sample size, her results were very intriguing. In the Aniakchak Wiki she wrote,

The Nucella ratios, averaged for each level, suggest that Aniakchak Bay was initially inhabited at a time when storms were fairly severe (higher ratios equate to longer shells and less turbulant waters, lower ratios represent short shells and turbulant waves). Wave action decreases as storms decrease in severity, so the analysis suggests that the weather grew increasingly calm for the people of Aniakchak Bay.

_{Nucella ratios (aperture size to total length). The longer bars suggest less stormy conditions. Level 10 was the deepest stratigraphic level excavated in Unit N449 E454.}

Given these intriguing results we decided to pursue this analysis. Shelly will be coming to Aniakchak this summer to measure modern Nucella in the intertidal zones around the site. We hope that we can study both sheltered and exposed beaches (although everything close to the site is pretty exposed). Shelly has contacted some of the zoology experts in invertebrate biomechanics, especially Dr. Richard Palmer at the University of Alberta. Palmer warns us that some four species of Nucella inhabit the north Pacific coast. The degree of morphological plasticity for each of these species, especially at the population level, is poorly known. He will be assisting Shelly in her species identification and in assessing the modern data.

Our ultimate goal is to better understand why people largely abandoned Aniakchak around 1300 years ago after having lived successfully in the bay for over 300 years. One set of hypotheses we are testing has to do with changing environmental conditions, habitat degradation, and resource depletion. The Nucella ratios should help us better understand this complex environmental situation.

Andrews, M. V.,
D. D. Gilbertson, M. Kent and P. A. Mellars 1985. Biometric Studies of Morphological Variation in the Intertidal Gastropod Nucella lapillus (L): Environmental and Palaeoeconomic Significance. Journal of Biogeography 12:71-87.

Palmer, A. R. 1992. Intraspecific variation in three species of rocky shore gastropods from Hong Kong: Correlations among habitats and a comparison with temperate species. Pp. 649-691 in B. Morton, ed. Proceedings of the Fourth International Marine Biological Workshop. Vol. 1. General Proceedings. Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong.

 Bone artifact from Aniakchak.

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.) 

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