Afognak Archaeology

I promise that this is my last post about my archaeological survey on Afognak.  From now on our blog will be all about more recent events like my trip to Old Harbor or our family trip out East.

On Afognak we were mostly recording all the old houses and features associated with the old Afognak Village that was abandoned after the earthquake in 1964.  The village was half destroyed by the ensuing tsunami, but the real reason everybody left was that the land also sank 5 feet and everybody's well was full of salt water.  A lot of the coastline also eroded away adjusting to the new relative sea level.  Since 1964 the last has rebounded back out of the ocean, and is only a couple of feet or so below what is was immediately prior to the earthquake.

I dug a lot of test pits looking for the old Russian artel and prehistoric sites but all I found were old gardens and more recent historic artifacts like this bead and piece of ceramic.  After I took this photo I reburied the pieces in my test pit.

While surveying the old village we also mapped and recorded all the old roads and trails.  In the photo above you can see 2 old trails intersecting in the woods.  The trail on the left is an old boardwalk between houses while the one on the right is an old road.

Above is one of the old buildings in Afognak Village.  I first visited the village in 1994, and it is amazing how much has changed since then.  Back then most of the buildings including the old church were still standing.  Today most of the buildings have collapsed and the forest is slowly reclaiming the old village.

Below is a close up of some of the fitted log work.  You can see that the builders pre-assembled the house and marked the logs so that they could re-assemble it where they wanted it.  The logs were all carefully carved for an exacting fit.

Our camp on Afognak was quite comfortable and we used an old laundry basket that we found on the beach for a table.  In this photo Ryan and I are playing a game of cribbage.

Ryan and his super accurate GPS.  This is the gear the SWCA archaeologists used to mark the locations of all the old houses, trails, site boundaries, culturally modified trees etc.  Ryan played the 'Tin Man' from the Wizard of Oz with an old funnel that we found.  We did not collect artifacts but left them all where we found them.  They are all a part of the story of Old Afognak Village.  Patrick

More Afognak Scenics

My hectic summer schedule has continued.  Last week I spent 3 days in the field in Old Harbor doing a small archaeological survey that entailed LOTS of test pits.  And yesterday I flew with Zoya, Leona and the kids for a 2 week vacation in New England.  So hectic that I still have not posted all my favorites from Afognak.  Here they are - up above is of the graveyard while below is the creek at the northeast end of town.

The old store out in the lake where the tsunami washed it in 1964.

A pretty beach view from the southwest end of town looking towards Graveyard Point in the distance.

Another view of the lake with all the dead spruce trees killed by the salt water due to subsidence after the 1964 earthquake.

The big beach just north of Graveyard Point looking towards Lipsett Point.

Another view of the big beach at the 'Aleut town' end of Afognak Village looking towards Graveyard point.  That's the Old Believers potato patch in the foreground.  Patrick

Afognak Life

A few more pictures from our visit to Afognak Island.  It is not often that I get to go on a remote archaeological survey and have my family visit.  I am also very thankful that the other archaeologists were patient and understanding!

Stuey loved finding antlers and dead animal bones.  He traded Ryan 2 skittles for a deer skull with the antlers still attached (for Stuey 2 skittles is a lot of moolah!).  Perhaps Stuey is fated to be a faunal analyst type archaeologist?

Afognak has lots of creeks to cross (top), and beaches to explore (below).  But I have to admit it was not sunny and warm the whole time or even most of the time.  Some days were spent huddled in the teepee around the woodstove.

New Field Food Recipes

For the last three weeks while in the field I have been gathering and cooking up quite a few wild plants.  Mostly, just like in years past, we gathered and ate the nettles and fireweed shoots growing on the sites we were testing.  But this year on Afognak the crew I was with showed me a new plant - Morel Mushrooms.  I think we ate them every night on Afognak.  I would've never dared eaten them unless someone told me that they are edible.  On Afognak we also ate a lot of beach lovage and lambs quarter (chenopodium) - seaside plants we don't usually get to eat when we survey on rivers and lakes in Kodiak's interior.

Our recipe for the mushrooms was really simple.  Cut them up, quickly saute in oil and then add some heavy whipping cream.  That's it.  Sometimes we also added them to the daily pasta or rice and beans meal.  Morels are good and very easy to cook.  Just like the mushrooms you buy in the store!

On Afognak we were also given a freshly caught red salmon.  I decided to cook it in a new, less messy way.  My recipe is as follows:
1) Cut and fry up a red onion and 1/3 of a red cabbage in plenty of peanut oil (this is true of every meal we cook in the field).  For this meal I added old bay seasoning and a squirt of garlic from a tube.
2) After the onions and cabbage have browned and reduced I add the pasta pack - I used a pack of bowtie pasta.  Then I pour in boiling water up to just below the top of the pasta.  I put the filleted and skinned fish on top of the pasta and covered it with slices of manchago and baby bell cheese.  I also sprinkled on some nettles.
3) Then I put a tightly sealed lid on top and put the whole dish on the wood stove.  Once I could hear that the water inside was boiling I moved the pot to a cooler section of the stove.
4)  After about 20 minutes I checked on the fish and pasta and both were perfectly done and all the water absorbed by the pasta.  I added heavy whipping cream and served the pasta and fish.  The salmon was perfectly steamed!

This dish got rave reviews from my fellow archaeologists.

On the Karluk River Jill and I tried a new way of cooking nettles.  We basically made nettle pesto.  Jill picked a bunch of really tender nettle tips
1) Then I did the usual fry up a red onion and a 1/3 of a red cabbage in peanut oil.  I added old bay spice and garlic too - just like above. Once the onions and cabbage had reduced I added the nettles and tossed them until coated in oil.  Then I added water to the frying pan and flash sauteed the nettles.
2) I put the reduced veggies into a big pot with a tight sealing lid and added the pasta.  Then added the water until just below the top of the pasta.
3) Return to boil on the wood stove and then add 3 or 4 baby bell cheese and a healthy dose of manchago cheese.  Then we let it sit on a cooler area of the stove for 20 minutes or so until the pasta had sucked up all the water.
4) When the pasta was done I added heavy whipping cream and some basil pesto from a tube, and stirred it all up.  The tender nettles had sort of melted into the pasta and created a 'pesto sauce' of their own.  Jill and I thought it was delicious!

Finally, I did bring a bag of lambs quarter back from Afognak and put it on top of a pan of roasted potatos - with you guessed it - plenty of manchago and baby bell cheese.  We decided that lambs quarter is WAY better than spinach.  It lacks that aciddy/chalky taste that spinach imparts to the mouth. And it is also free and found in large quantities at local beaches.  Patrick

Karluk River Flashback

It was only a couple of weeks ago, but it seems like ages since I floated down the Karluk River with Jill and Matt.  I got back and left for the field again so quickly that I never really got to think back on my time on the river.  And it was a good trip.  Matt and I both got Pushki burns, but the symptoms waited until we got back to town to get bad - and other than that nothing went wrong.  Actually pretty much everything went right!

Beautiful scenery.  I brought my good camera and even a telephoto lens.  I wanted to get a good picture of a bear.  But we never saw a bear, and I never even used my telephoto lens.  I took the eagle pictures with my normal camera lens.  Really no need for a telephoto when it comes to eagles.

Below is Jill taking test pit notes at a site along the river.  She wanted me to take the picture because she loved the creek in the background.  We nicknamed it 'Disney Creek' because it looked like a creek from a Disney movie.

We went VERY lightweight for the trip.  When Jill and I flew out of Kodiak our total weight - including us and 2 rafts - was 690 pounds.  That was so light that it had me worried we had forgotten something major.  The weight also did not include Matt who later joined us at Karluk Lake.  But our light load did make sense when I thought about how we did not bring a full sized teepee - or even our usual cast iron skillet and Coleman stove.  We made do in the lightweight teepee I usually take elk hunting, and did most of our cooking right on the lightweight wood stove (see photo below).  The teepee and wood stove weighed around 5 pounds all together.

The main reason we went so lightweight is that I wanted to fit into just 2 inflatable canoes.  Also, I worried that if Matt did not join us at Karluk Lake that Jill and I would've had to fit into just one canoe.  But Matt did make it and as you can see below the three of us and all our gear fit easily into the 2 canoes.

Going lightweight made it so much easier to set up camp every evening.  The less stuff you have the less you have to carry up into to camp and set up.  Less is really more if you want to get a camp set up quickly.  And the quicker you get everything set up - the sooner you get the wood stove and dinner going.  Patrick

Karluk Panoramics

Going on back to back archaeological surveys means that I never got a chance to go through all my photos from the first trip.  And so for the last few days after I got back from the second trip I have been editing photos from both trips.  I have been swamped in photo editing.  One thing I like to do right away is stitch all the photos together that were intended to be panoramic images.  I know if I don't do it soon after my return that i'll probably never do it.  The same is true of photo editing actually.  When will you ever get back to editing photos if you don't do it right away?

Anyhow, here are a few of the pretty pictures I stitched together from the Karluk River survey.  The top photo is of the lower river taken on our last evening on the river.

This is a view of the river near the Portage looking towards the Village of Larsen Bay.

Two views of different camps on the river.  We stayed a few days near the outlet to the lake and then floated down the river testing sites for the last few days.  While floating the river we had a different camp site every night.

Jill looking for charcoal in the backdirt of a test pit.  All of our testpits were in the hearths of late prehistoric houses.  The whole goal of the survey was to collect charcoal to radiometric date.  We want to get an idea of how many villages were on the river at any one moment in time.
Patrick

A Fathers Day Ski

Today Patrick and I hiked up and  skiied down Pyramid. 

The temperatures were in the 70's, there was a light breeze and the snow was perfect for the ski down.

Zoya

Afognak Panoramics

Thursday night I got back from my survey of Old Afognak Village.  We mapped all the structures and tried to figure out what was what based on old aerial photos and the local oral history.  We had a composite aerial of the entire village from 1962 and each standing structure on it was named.  However, we also found lots of buildings that did not show up on the aerial and also lots of pits and old foundations.  We mapped and described them all.

My main job was to look for prehistoric archaeological sites, and surprisingly enough, I did not find any new ones.  The early 19th century Russian Afognak Artel is supposed to be in the area and I tried very hard to find it.  But no luck. I did find what I believe is the foundation of the first Afognak Village Church, and I did find lots of what I thought were old building foundations but what turned out to be gardens.  I put a lot of test pits into old gardens.

Anyway - I also took a lot of photos.  Here are a couple of the panoramic photos that I stitched together.  The top photo is of the swamp behind the village.  I took this same photo later in the summer a few years ago.  The photo below is of the woods behind the old school building.  The woods were beautiful but very difficult to photograph.  The photos never seemed to capture it quite right.

Below is an old building resting in the lake behind the south end of town.  Many of the buildings got moved by the tsunami in 1964 and were not resting in their original spots.  Prior to the 1964 earthquake there was not even a lake in this area!  Patrick

Daydreams of a Jury Foreperson

The past 3 months I have served as Jury Foreperson for the local Grand Jury panel. To put it mildly, I dreaded every Thursday. My 3 months is officially over!

On Grand Jury, the 18 people there are to determine if there is enough evidence (presented by the District Attorney) for the cases to go to trial as a felony. Thats it. Its not a mini trial.

Grand Jury was painstaking, because it seems that many jurors didn't understand this and thought that grand jury was mini-law school, or CSI Kodiak. This was quite unfortunate, as it costs the District Attorneys time, our time as well as the witnesses time. From what I hear, this happens in nearly every grand jury group of people--some groups are worse than others. I believe ours may have been an extreme case.

Any question of witnesses that starts with "I'm just curious" or "what did you think" just shouldn't be asked by a juror.  It wastes time. Two of the sessions in the past 3 months led us into a full second day to get through all the cases.When this happened, I had to cancel all my physical therapy clients the next day and was very disappointed. Disappointed because it could have been avoided if people were more thoughtful about their questions.

I hate to sound snooty about the whole thing, but after several weeks, it seems like there should be some EJECTION process for jurors who exceed their quote of bad questions. Really. Truly. It costs taxpayers dollars.

My Grand Jury Daydream:  having a big red button I could press and after someone has exceeded 3 bad questions, I can press it, which causes a bell to ring and they drop into the floor and disappear from our small grand jury room. Of course that would never work, because people would just ask bad questions on purpose to get off of grand jury. Oh well. A Nice daydream anyhow.

I'm just glad its over with.

Zoya

Patrick returning

Return from Dig
Patrick returns home from Afognak in an hour and I am in a mad frenzy to get things to a nice clean condition for him and the crew! The winds are picking up BIG TIME and they are boating in to beat a big storm tomorrow.

Morphing
Its funny because when Patrick is gone, I slowly morph into him. Throughout the years, this occurs more and more.  For example, when Patrick is home, he is INSISTENT on he and the kids picking up the toys in the living room before he reads bedtime books to them.
Sometimes when the kids are super tired, I find it challenging to do that, as I just want them to get into bed. But I've noticed when Patrick is gone, I generally insist on us picking up the living room. There is something nice to coming out to a clean living room when the kids are all tucked in and in bed. Much better than looking at a big mess.

Nora Quote
Tonight in the car, the kids were bickering. I said, "Nora and Stuey, life is short. Why can't you guys just get along and enjoy eachother? Really?!"
Nora replied, "Ok mommy. We will." Pause. "How short is life?"
I smiled to myself and didn't know how to respond to that one. Sigh. The questions kids ask.

Ok, back to cleaning.

Zoya

Afognak Moments

 The evenings were spent around a toasty wood fired stove. Stuey loved watching the fire. Ross, Ryan and Ann were incredibly patient with the kids. Bless their hearts.

 Our last day there, we watched Patrick dig a DEEP test pit. It took close to an hour for him to dig the hole. The findings were FASCINATING>>>Even I, as a non-archaeologist person was in awe. I'll explain more later. Suspenseful, eh?

 Nora likes using the slate rocks as a little writing board. She would play dot-to-dot games on her rock, as well as write out random letters to see if they formed a word. Hours of entertainment!

 On our hike. One of the dilapidated buildings of Old Afognak village.

 Stuey and Nora modeling the completed test pit.

 Stuey building houses with the firewood.

Zoya