Old Dirt - New Thoughts

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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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).