First Week of 'Com Arch'

The first week of Community Archaeology is in the books. Every summer for 4 weeks I lead an archaeological excavation on Kodiak's Roadsystem that is open to the public. The high school, with Exxon oil spill money, helps us by funding high school interns. They get paid to do archaeology and can get high school and college credit to boot. A great many local volunteers join us as well. For me it is the major event of the whole summer. When the dig begins Summer is just starting and after it ends Fall is in the air.

We get to excavate cool archaeological sites too. For the past three summers we have been digging at Salonie Mound, a 3 to 7 thousand year-old site at the head of Womens Bay. The top of the site (3 to 4 thousand years ago) appears to have been a salmon processing camp, and we found a great many split cobble scrapers, U-shaped abraders and other tools used for fish processing. Old fire pits litter the top of the site where the inhabitants lit smudge fires to dry their fish for the winter. Deeper down in the site we are finding evidence that the earlier inhabitants (5-7 thousand years ago) were hunting sea mammals and living in tents.

The top photo is from today and shows part of the crew digging into 'L3' the 4 to 5 thousand year-old layer at the site. The next photo is of interns Karen, Dianne and Lauren entertaining my dog Roxy during a 'energy drink' break (note the 'full throtle' in Karen's hand). In the third photo Lauren carries a bucket up to Mark Rusk at the screen. Mark helps me run the dig (he did last summer too), but I am never sure if he comes up for the archaeology or the deer hunting. The next photo is of Mark and I with the interns Dianne, Alicia, Karen, Lauren and Mackenzie. Finally in the bottom photo Don Clark rests while local volunteer Jill is hard at work. Yup, we got Don Clark back up for another summer of archaeology. He is the same Don Clark who basically wrote the book on Kodiak Archaeology. He has been doing archaeology on Kodiak since 1951. Patrick