We are all in Boston right now for my College 20th reunion (Zoya will post on this later), but I'll add one last post from the Karluk/O'Malley archaeological survey.
As I said earlier we did not find many new sites, but we still learned a lot. In the top photo Rose is holding up an incised slate lance head that would have been used to hunt sea mammals. Alutiiq people made points like this between about 1000 and 1500 years ago - so when we found this one in a house we are able to date the house. People lived in it sometime around 1200 years ago. When we radiocarbon date the charcoal we found in the house's hearth we will know exactly how old.
The house were we found the lance head is part of a large village depicted in the bottom photo. This is exciting because it matches the pattern we have seen on other lake and river systems on Kodiak. It appears that at around AD 800 there was a large surge of settlement at the outlets and inlets to Kodiak's large lakes. At this time people were abandoning the Kachemak Bay region and the Lower Alaska Peninsula. Perhaps everyone was moving to Kodiak, and with all the new people on the island people had to create new villages in new places - not enough room on the coast so people started to live inland. In the next few years we will be exploring this idea with more survey work. Patrick
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