Summer Science archaelogy could rewrite area history

As part of their Natural History of Alaska class, the Ellikarrmiut Summer Science students have been participating in a limited (but very productive) dig on the site of an old kiiyaq, or men’s house. Exciting artifacts from the dig could eventually prove that humans have been inhabiting and using Nunivak Island and the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta for much longer than has previously been proven.

It turns out that our camp here at Nash Harbor isn’t at the site called Ellikarrmiut at all. That village site sits on a spit of land just across the river, while we’re camped on the site of a different, higher village called Qimugglugpagmiut (loosely translated as “people of Big Bad Dog”). Oral tradition maintained that Ellikarrmiut was the older village, and an earlier dig at Nash Harbor focused almost exclusively on that side of the river. However, two afternoons of a tightly focused and supervised student dig at the Qimugglugpagmiut kiiyaq have already turned up artifacts very likely to prove older than anything found during two summers of digs across the river.

The kiiyaq was used and inhabited during the twentieth century; Joe David, our camp elder-in-residence, remembers taking fire baths and sleeping there. However, it is rapidly becoming apparent that the kiiyaq was built on the foundations of structures thousands of years old.

The most exciting finds so far have been exquisitely chipped, tiny projectile points and side-blades (microlithics????) that could be early indicators of a site from the Arctic Small Tool (AST) tradition. AST peoples took advantage of a warming trend and melting ice sheets to spread rapidly across the Arctic from probable origins in Siberia around 4500 years ago. These highly mobile and adaptible people probably followed rapidly expanding populations of game animals like caribou.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 11:49 am and is filed under Martin_L, NSF TCUP, Summer Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.