Another rainy day, but we did manage to uncover a 6000
year-old house. Yesterday I had thought
we had a house with roof sods – and that is what we found. I was quite relieved to not be wrong – no
nasty surprises this time around.
We uncovered a semi-subterranean house with a bright red
ochre floor that had had a thick layer of roof sods on top for insulation. Last year we found the floor of the house in
a test pit and dated some charcoal from the floor to a little over 6000 years old. I had remembered the date as 4000 BP (before
present), but when we got home this evening and checked the date it was 4000
BC. But while we were excavating the
house I had the wrong date in mind, and I was a little miffed that we were not
finding the stuff you typically associate with 4000-year-old houses on
Kodiak. Also red ochre floors are
generally associated with earlier houses.
Figuring out that it was actually 6000 years old made sense. It also means we excavated one of the oldest
semi-subterranean houses ever excavated on Kodiak – what a pleasant surprise! Parts of such houses have been excavated before
but never a clear-cut, undisturbed structure.
Usually such houses are at sites where later construction activities have
seriously muddled things up.
Our house seems to have been lived in for only a short time
and people never lived at the site again.
It had a wide doorway facing the ocean and there was a quartz knife, a
basalt flake knife, a pumice abrader, and a whetstone right outside the
door. Back inside there were a couple of
ochre grinders in the back corner and a bunch of basalt flakes at the
back. Kind of cool to imagine a guy
sitting out front working on things with his knives while he watched the
ocean. While inside someone else ground
ochre and flaked stone tools. We still
have to remove the thin floor and so may find more artifacts. The wide doorway – it may even have been open
all along the front - with no sort of entrance tunnel hints that it may have
been a warm weather house.
Patrick
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We start to excavate the house in the morning |
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Uncovering the red ochre floor |
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Looking good |
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All done |
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Sam for scale - what a view! |
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Lunchtime walk to warm up |
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Quartz Knife from in front of the door |
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Basalt flake knife |
1 comment:
Nice red ochre floor! You guys have moved a lot of dirt already!
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