Spike and the fork

'Spike'

For the past few weeks practically every day at the dig we'd see the same deer - a small little spike.  He's practically tame and with no originality we nicknamed him 'spike'.

Once deer hunting season began I horrified the rest of the archaeology crew by suggesting I was going to harvest Spike.  I was joking, but the fact of the matter is that once you've named a critter it is extremely difficult to harvest said critter.  And this is especially true if he is tame and just stands there.  That's not hunting!

But I must admit I thought about Spike while my friend Gregg and I were on a recent deer hunt.  It was more of a hike than a hunt and we passed on the first couple of bucks that we saw.  Then we saw some semi big bucks that eluded us, and after a long hike it was beginning to look like we were going to go home without a deer.

That's about when Gregg started to point out spikes for me to shoot.  One was just standing there at about 50 yards.  I told Gregg that I was not going to hike 8 miles to harvest a spike when I could so much more easily do it much closer to the road with the pet 'spike'.  Harvesting a spike was out of the question.

That's about when 'forkie' showed up on the scene.  Nothing wrong with a 2 point buck!  And so we found something worth the 8 mile hike.  Patrick

The view 5 miles and about 2500' vertical into our hike

'Forkie'

Third Helpings

Guest room ready for summer visitors.

Piggyback with Justin!

British Soccer Camp coaches Sam (left) and Sean (right).

A month ago I was putting the final touches on cleaning out our back large guest room. For much of the winter, it was covered in laundry, papers, blankets and books. With our friend Justin coming for a 3 week archaeology stay, it was time to clear it out. This room holds a soft spot in my heart, as it was our bedroom before our house was added onto. I'm pretty sure Nora was conceived on that bed and I've always slept well in there with the high lofty wood ceiling.
The wood lulls me to sleep.

After I put the finishing touches with the blankets and towels on the bed, I snapped a picture. It felt so good to have it all ready to be lived in and loved again this summer by friends.

Irish and British accents graced our house for a week with the recent stay of two british soccer camp coaches. This was our second year hosting coaches and they were as lovely as always! Very considerate, appreciative and up for trying new things. They had never had red beans and rice before, or king salmon, or deer roast... so many firsts and I was impressed with their wilingness to try the many new flavors. Even though the guys spoke english, it was at times hard to understand when they spoke to eachother because of the strong accents mixed with quick speed of talk. Its so fun to be around foreign languages again.

Patrick cooked Sam and Sean  Yorkshire pudding with deer roast one night and fish/chips with yellow curry another night. Both were a bit hit with them. They had hearty second and third helpings of food.

Zoya

Summer Goodbyes

Marias and I chillin' and grillin!

This summer has been full of many goodbyes. Too many, really.
Nora's good friend Natalie moved to Anchorage in June.
Then my BFF Marias moved to California after a 3 year Kodiak Coast Guard tour. I first met Marias 11 years ago during an earlier Kodiak tour and she and I are dear friends. Somehow time or distance doesn't interrupt our laughter, tears and connection with eachother.

I recently found out another close friend, Erica, is moving in a month. A lot of loss, change to adjust to this summer.

Zoya

Clara (front purple) is in my girl scout troop...this was her goodbye scout outing. We watched whales from Abercrombie beach while eating popcorn.

Features, Profiles and Backfilling

East wall profile - Very complicated with pits cutting into pits and ochre-stained floors at bottom

Oddly enough, one of our most significant discoveries at the Kashevaroff Site is that the earliest inhabitants stripped the site, all at once, of sods and dirt, before they built their structures. The structure foundations were then cut directly into the glacial till at the front of the site (nearest the creek). They flattened the floors with blocks of sods, and constructed the super structures - topping them with a sod roofs and circling them with low sod walls.

Inside the structures we found ochre stained floors and artifacts, but outside the structures we found just a thin black, charcoal stained surface everywhere on the till and sterile ash.  This surface extended under the stacked sod walls and linked up with the floors inside the structures.  Basically the black surface represents 'tracked charcoal' after a massive episode of sod and dirt quarrying.  The quarrying appears to have all happened at once and was associated with the construction of the structures.  All of the quarried sods lacked artifacts and charcoal stains - so no had lived at the site before the sod quarrying episode took place.

The extent of the sod quarrying episode is a HUGE discovery.  We have known of the propensity of early Alutiiq peoples to quarry sods, and these early sites are generally a mixed up melange of overlapping sods.  But I have always assumed that the mixing and digging occurred a little at a time, over an extended period of time.  It now seems like it might be a more sporadic but far more intensive activity.

Patrick

A substantial structure at the very bottom with offset hearth - a house?

A page from my notes about the feature seen above

Pretty darn deep!

And now to put it all back in - it already took 3 days to backfill the main block

Some Final Week Discoveries

A perfect sideblade made of translucent chert

We are all done with the digging at the Kashevaroff Site.  As usual it all ended with a rush and we made our biggest discovery on the final day of the excavation - 1 or 2 substantial structures at the very bottom of the site that appear to represent houses. 

During the final week as we dug down into the oldest layers of the site we encountered 2 large pit features that caused a great deal of confusion.  Initially I thought they represented one large feature, but when we excavated the units in between them they did not connect up.  One of the pits truncated the other and we ended up with what I called the Mastercard Symbol - 2 overlapping circles. 

The pits appear to represent smoke-processing features and were full of inter bedded layers of gravel, sods, and charcoal.  In one of the pits we even found some fish bone.  So there was some fish processing going on at the site.  But most of the tools we found were sideblades for cutting up meat, and 'bone wedges' for splitting sea mammal bone to get at the marrow, and lances for killing sea mammals.  So clearly still a lot of sea mammal hunting and processing going on at the site.  However, it also is clear that the oldest inhabitants at the site were doing a lot more than just sea mammal hunting.

Under the pits we found a continuous living surface and 2 large features.  There was some additional confusion because the overlying pits cut into the older features, but we figured it all out in the end. One of the features was circled by large postholes, had a circular trench inside the outer postholes, and a hearth.  It looks like it was covered by a substantial roof of dirt and sods (more on these features in a later post).  Beside the hearth we found numerous sideblades and a small lamp. 

Unlike in the upper and more recent layers at the site (where there seems to have been a focus of hunting and processing sea mammals), in the older layers at the bottom of the site we found a much more diverse inventory of tool types and a great deal of tool manufacturing debris.  Clearly the inhabitants were spending more time at the site - and not just visiting for the day.  Patrick

A fish bone spine!  So not just ALL sea mammal harvesting going on

Leslie found the lamp by the hearth of the house feature we uncovered on the final day of excavation

Another sideblade - these started to show up fast and furious near the bottom of the site

Molly's awesome picture of Ryan and his broken adze

Blueberry Safari

This past weekend it was all about subsistence in the Saltonstall world.  On Saturday I helped harvest meat, and dug up half the garlic from the garden.  And then on Sunday we collected something like 2 or 3 gallons of blueberries.

The berry picking expedition was like something you'd see on the Serengeti Plain 100,000 years ago.  A band of hunter gatherers, followed by a pack of dogs, traipsing into the woods to collect dinner.

Every couple of minutes Stuey would yell, 'I found the best blueberry bush ever!'

I couldn't help but think of optimal foraging theory - how dense do the berries have to be to get me to stop and pick, and when do I move on to another bush?  It was also clear that many of the bushes had been picked before we got there, and I got to thinking it's all relative.  Early in the season when none of the bushes have been picked it needs to be a pretty good bush to hold my attention. But as the season progresses we lower our standards because the densely packed bushes are difficult to find.

It certainly was a good time.

Nora wants to fill our spare 'elk' freezer with berries, and she is well on her way!

Patrick

Tank likes to pick blueberries too!

Week Three Discoveries

Whimsical chipped stone object - inukshuk?

Last week we excavated down into the oldest layers at the site where we found numerous red ochre stained living surfaces.  Each surface probably represents the floor of a tent or some sort of temporary shelter. The surfaces were littered with red chert flakes.  It seems people did spend more time at the site during the earliest occupation than they did later in time.

Our biggest discoveries came near the end of the week when we recognized 2 larger features.  A possible house near the very bottom of the site, and another large smoke processing pit like the one we excavated last year.

The 'house' has a thin ochre stained gravel floor and appears to have had stacked sod walls.  It looks very much like the feature we excavated over in the main block in 2014. We will be excavating a small portion of this feature later this week, and we will be able to examine it in profile.

The large smoke processing pit is full of large rocks, charcoal and flecks of burned sea mammal bone.  It is basically underneath the one we excavated last year, and in places they intersected - or rather the younger one was dug into the older one.  But at the edges it is clear that the older one was filled with our 'L2A' that represents the circa 4500 year old occupation at the site. It was then re-used and massively reworked around 4200 years ago.

The find of the week was a large notched cobble associated with the older smoke pit.  The notched cobbles we found last year are also associated with the older pit.  It also looks like the large notched cobble might have been a net anchor.  It is too big for anything else.  This may well be the earliest evidence for the use of nets ever found in the Kodiak Archipelago.

Today marks the beginning of the final week of the dig - here's to reaching the bottom of the site!

Patrick

Another toy bayonet?

Block B near the beginning of the week

Calcined sea mammal bone associated with the older smoke pit

A 'battered' bayonet - for fish! (we still have only found a handful of these)

5000 year old net anchor?

Site visits back in the day

Long-time Kodiak archaeologist Justin H has been helping with Community Archaeology this summer, and one evening we went through all the old dig photos. While going down memory lane I found these of Stuey, Nora and Zoya bringing me lunch.  There were from when we were digging out at Cliff Point.  The top one is from 2010 while the bottom 2 are from 2009.  Wow!  Time passes.
Patrick

Opening Day

 Opening day of deer hunting season on Kodiak is August 1rst, but for me it is actually the first Saturday or Sunday of August.  I can't go hunting during the week at this time of the year because I am usually running the Community Archaeology dig.

Anyway this year my hunting partners and I had grand plans to hike up into the mountains and camp just like we do every year.  Only this year on Friday evening as we drove out the road to where we planned to begin our hunt it started to rain HARD.  The wind picked up and it got very foggy.  It did not look very promising.  So we opted to forego the camping, eat dinner at a roadhouse, and sleep in our own beds instead.

We then all got up super early, met at the trailhead at 4AM, and hiked up to the alpine in the dark.  And there were deer everywhere.  We saw at least 5 different herds and maybe 40 deer total. 

We picked out a couple of likely looking bucks and harvested them in the early morning light.  Then came the hike out to the road and home. 

For dinner we had deer liver and new potatoes.  It's hunting season! 

Patrick

Abercrombie Pictograph

 Stuey and I kayaked along the shores of Mill Bay out to Fort Abercrombie on Sunday, and we found a pictograph.  Nothing too exciting, and clearly not Alutiiq in origin.  But I loved seeing it from the kayak.  It reminded me that this is the way that petroglyphs are supposed to be viewed - from the water.

Most of the Alutiiq petroglyphs I've seen are on outcrops overlooking the water.  They are there to be seen by waterborne visitors.  They tell the visitor that the place belongs to whoever pecked the glyph and that the owner possesses some serious magic.

Funnily enough,  I think the graffiti artist who painted the pictograph that we saw was thinking along the same lines.

Patrick

Week Two Doings

Justin with 2 'toy' points found near each other in Block B

The second week of Community Archaeology is complete.  Last week we had some rain, but managed to still dig every day.  The major accomplishment of the week was finishing the main block.  We finally got to the bottom -  Main block Kashevaroff Site 2013-2016 R.I.P.  By the end of the week we had transitioned over to Block B where Catherine W uncovered the huge smoke processing feature last year. 

At the very bottom of the main block we did discover a structure of some sort at the very edge of the excavation.  The feature extended into area we had partially excavated during the first 2 years of the dig, and I was able to go back to my 2013 and 2014 notes and piece the whole feature together.  It was not dug into the ground but rests on sterile and stacked ashes at the very bottom of the site. Nor did it have built up walls or a sod roof.  It was circular, ringed with numerous posts and measured about 3 meters across.  The floor was very thin and mostly gravel, but thick with charcoal on the half we excavated in 2013 and 2014.  I believe it represents a temporary shelter.

In Block B we are getting into the older deposits below the old smoke processing pit.  The big find in Block B was Justin's small hearth.  It contained calcined bone and some fired sods.

On to week three!  Patrick

We take all volunteers - especially if they want to screen

Solomon with a sideblade

The bottom of the main block - postholes on the middle left represent structure

Alex and a chipped point fragment

Justin and Solomon recover some calcined bone in Block B