Com Arch Week 3

Another week of Community Archaeology in the books, and we actually got to dig every day! It did rain pretty hard on Thursday, but we did put in some time on the excavation anyway. And 'putting in time' is about the right choice of words. On arrival at the museum, I had actually called it a rain day and everybody was happily cleaning artifacts. But it stopped raining. A visitor to the museum even expressed surprise that we were not out there digging. According to him, 'the roads are dry all the way to Chiniak'. So at 11AM I decided to go for it - and as we drove out to the site it started to rain again. But hey, we were on site so we dug. Before long it was a slippery mess and the crew looked like pro mud wrestlers. I decided to quit early and as we drove to town the sun came out. Some days you just can't win.

Nonetheless, while we might have lost a battle on Thursday we certainly won the champaign for the week. We got to the very bottom of the site and partially uncovered what looks like a fairly substantial structure that is over 7000 years old. It appears to have had an outside hearth and is surrounded by numerous large post holes. The holes you see in the photos once held wood posts that supported the roof of the structre - when they rotted away they left holes in the dirt for us archaeologist to uncover. They basically mark the outside walls of the structure; it was almost 15 feet across! Quite the pad for the Alutiiq foragers at the head of Womens Bay 7000 years ago. It may end up as the oldest complete house ever excavated on Kodiak Island, but I'll wait until we get radiocarbon dates back before making that claim (last year I had to eat crow about a similiar claim).

In the top photo Mackenzie shows off a 7000 year old basalt lance head that she found on the floor of the structure described above. In the next photo the crew works at uncovering the structure's bottom layer. The bottom layer is a smear of charcoal spread out all over the floor - the inhabitants later refurbished the floor of the structure with grass sods and the later floors were smeared with red ochre. In the bottom photo Don Clark takes a break while the crew enjoys their Friday afternoon energy drink break.