While we were down at the Olga Lakes we conducted an archaeological survey of the lower river and lake and excavated a 1000 year-old house on the banks of the upper river. We did the survey first. When we survey we walk the banks of the river and look for prehistoric sites. Generally sites are either dotted with old house depressions or covered with distinctive lush vegetation, but sometimes the older sites are less obvious and we only find them by digging a test pit and looking for fire cracked rock from old campfires or charcoal stained soil. Once we found a site, Mark and I would map it with a transit while Brian and Justin dug test pits into the house hearths looking for charcoal to radiocarbon date. Ideally we like to date one house from every village, but mostly we are able to estimate the age of the site by the types of artifacts we find and the architectural style of the house depressions.
The top photo shows us setting out one morning from camp on survey. It was spitting rain and snow - hence the new snow on the mountains behind us. In the second photo I am sitting on the side of an old house depression working on the site sketch map. When we map a site I sketch it first, making sure to draw all the house depressions and their orientation to the river bank. We use the transit only to shoot the hearth of each house and to map all of the landscape features (river, bluff edges etc). In the photo if you look closely you can see the main room of a multiroom house in front of me and little siderooms on either side of me.
After we finshed surveying the lower river and lake (we found 11 new sites and mapped around 200 housepits), we moved our entire camp to the mouth of the upper river. This involved an overloaded boat journey across the lake. We noticed that the lake is not very deep - we could see the sandy bottom the whole way across. The house we wanted to excavate is part of a site that is just a 20 minute walk up river from our new camp.
We chose this particular house depression because it represents a certain style of Alutiiq house that has never been excavated. We call them 'cluster houses' because they seem to be single room houses surrounded by storage pits. They generally date to about 1000 years ago. The year before, we determined that the neighbor to the one we excavated is 1000 years old. These houses interest us because they appear to be a transitional style of house between the single room houses - suitable for one nuclear family - of an earlier era, and the huge multiroom houses - suitable for 2 or 3 related nuclear families - the Alutiiq lived in until about 100 years ago. Some archaeologists have argued that the multiroom houses were brought to the Kodiak Archipelago around 800 years ago by invaders from the Alaska Peninsula who supplanted the local population. We believe that the new style of house was developed by the local Alutiiq to allow them to store more salmon under the control of one extended family. If we can demonstrate that the houses evolved on Kodiak we will have struck a devestating blow to the 'invasion' theory.
And we did it! After dealing with frozen ground, pushki roots and thick roof sods (dirt and grass sods that the Alutiiq used to roof their houses), we uncovered the house foundation shown in the bottom 2 photos (one is a map of the house). Mark is squatting in the main room and that is a box hearth in the middle of the room. The people who built the house dug the foundation you see, with the tunnels to the siderooms, and stacked all the dirt on top for a thick roof. A perfect transitional house form. Like the single room houses of the earlier era it had roof sods, a small main room (around 3 meters across), and long, deep entrance tunnel. But like the houses of the later era it had siderooms connected the main room by tunnels, and it appears that the siderooms were used for sleeping. The house also had 2 salmon storage pits not connected to the main room. We had not expected the tunnels connecting the 'pits' of our 'cluster' house to the main room, but they certainly fit with our theory regarding the evolution of the new, multiroom, house form. It appears that multiroom houses are just a lot older than we expected! Patrick
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