Penguk Artifacts

Not all was bad at Penguk. The archaeology was fantastic! Huge houses and many different types of structures (more to come on this in a later post). But what I particularly liked to find was all the chipped stone tools. On Kodiak we don't usually find much in the way of chipped stone tools - it's usually all ground slate and cobble tools. So it was pretty cool to find chipped stone lances, knives and sideblades on a fairly routine basis. A great many of the chipped points were tiny (see top photo with wild geranium blossom for scale) - some were the size of my finger nail. I think these points might have tipped arrow shafts. We also found large lances, and the sideblades that would have been inset into the shafts of spears. Another common find was pottery (that's what Molly's holding up in the 4rth photo down).

For the most part we found the standard artifacts one would expect to find in a 1500 year old Norton culture village. The artifacts are typical Norton. However, we did not find any ground slate. Why no slate? Late Norton sites usually have some ground slate. Also the houses we excavated our much larger than the typical houses associated with Norton - more on this in the next post! Patrick