It is a short hop by air from Dead Horse on to Barrow. Nok Aker, whose full name, Nokinba, is the Inupiaq word for snowy owl, meets us while we wait for the luggage.

Nok Aker, on the left, and Michael Donovan, on the right.

He is great, maintaining the tradition of the hospitality of the north. In the hours and days that follow we quickly learn that the weather, even now in mid-summer, can change very quickly from pleasant and warm to damp, rainy, windy and bitingly cold. But happily for us, extremely strong winds the preceding days have blown in ice from the open sea, which drifts slowly and beautifully along the gravel beaches of the coast.

Coastal sea ice.

Ice! It is a wonderful sight, and seems to structure the entire ecosystem and community. The locals in Barrow are happy to see the ice too, and launch boats to hunt seals on the ice almost around the clock in the 22 hours of sunlight at this time of year.

The ancient village site of Barrow was known as Ukpiagvik, which means “The Place Where We Hunt Snowy Owls.” Along the beach bluffs the mounded semi-subterranean whale rib and driftwood house beams are visible in the soil where the ancient houses are eroding into the sea.

Welcome to Ukpiagvik.

Ancient house mounds.

Driftwood beams from ancient house eroding into the sea.

Me beside a whale rib house beam sticking out of the ground.

A semi-subterranean house door.

The village of Ukpiagvik was occupied for more than a thousand years, but like many arctic coastal archaeological sites is gradually eroding into the sea. The loss of such important arctic archaeological and cultural heritage sites is exacerbated by rising sea level and increased exposure to spring and autumn storms in the face of decreasing periods of winter coastal ice protection. However, as in the past, the lifestyle of the local people in Barrow remains focused on the resources of the sea: whales, seals, and walrus, and fish, with trips inland to hunt caribou.

The feeling of tradition in Barrow is very strong, we ask questions of all the local people we meet, starting to learn from them about their history and lifestyles. At the Inupiaq Heritage Center we meet the carver of a baleen boat.

Artist Larry Okomailak with his baleen boat.

He is the great-grandson of a Hawaiian who sailed on a whaling vessel to San Francisco in the late 1800s and was shanghai’d on a whaling ship to Alaska, where he stayed to raise a family, whose descendants include this artisan. He is a contemporary example of the historical mix of Barrow traditions that included New England whalers, Hawaiians who came north on whaling vessels (voluntarily or not), and those of the local Inuit. The carver points out that the sail on the baleen boat is multicolored, with stripes of grey, tan, and white. I had noticed it wasn’t the usual black baleen. He explains that colored baleen develops only in old whales: female Bowhead whales must be old enough to have calved at least several times to develop baleen with such colors, and males had to be even older to have baleen with such hues. Bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) often live to well over 100 years old, and older whales with such baleen are rarely taken, so it is hard to find such colored baleen to include as the sail of his model boat. With this knowledge suddenly the baleen boat takes on a much greater meaning as a work of art and craft and cultural tradition.

Like many things in Barrow, I continue to realize that just as the mist and fog move in from the ocean and hide the land periodically during our visit, and clear away to reveal the crystalline beauty of the ice, I must look deeper and ask more questions to understand the many and rich traditions here, half revealed and half hidden like the ancient semi-subterranean houses.

To date, we have found 12 burials this season.

So how do we know where to dig?

One way is by digging “shovel test pits” (STPs), and that’s just what we did on Day 2 in the field.

The week before, the BASC logistics crew and several of our crew had gone on Friday to set up the two Weatherports (tents) that we use. The large white one is a combination storage/lunch area, and the smaller tan one is used as a bathroom facility.

When we arrived, lo and behold, the tan tent was collapsed and some distance from where it had been left. The door, the cover, and pieces of the metal frame were strewn everywhere.

Putting the tent back up.

It had been windy over the weekend, so at first we thought it had just blown down. Some of the crew secured the white tent with more tie-downs & gravel, and the rest of the crew dragged the pieces of the tent back and started to put it back up.

After that, we all took pinflags and started to walk the surface of the site, marking anything that had worked its way to the surface of the gravel over the winter. Since there were a lot of newbies, Laura & I, along with some of the more experienced grad students, had to check the flags, and wound up pulling some that were marking things we don’t collect.

Getting pin flags.

Lining up for the survey.

And off they go!

The end result—lots of pin flags.

In the end, we had a whole lot of pin flags showing things to be mapped in and collected.

The more we thought about the tent, the more we didn’t think it blew down. It had been tied to the surrounding logs with multiple ropes, and it was hard to imagine that all that had come untied just due to wind. Most folks here are really good at tying things down. The best guess is that maybe someone was having a bonfire somewhere on the point and was getting cold in the wind, and got the idea to borrow the tent. It looks like maybe they tried to move it as a whole and the frame collapsed. Anyway, we have it back up now.

However, this does present a few training challenges. Archaeology isn’t something that is taught in North Slope Borough schools (or most other schools for that matter.) College-level or graduate-level field school students usually arrive with at least a theoretical idea of what archaeology is and how it is done. High school students don’t. That means we have to teach them enough so they can be effective in the field, but not bore them into quitting in the process.

We do short lectures about archaeological basics and how to fill out a bag, we practice filling out the various recording forms we use at the site, and introduce the theodolite (an instrument we use to measure horizontal and vertical angles.) We also spend parts of a couple days in the lab processing artifacts so students can get familiar with the sorts of things they will (or should) be finding, and get some hands-on experience on what will happen to the artifacts they will be collecting in the field.

We also try to do more active things. One is an exercise in mapping, ethnographic observation, and site interpretation. The more experienced students get to be the actors. Each pair of them gets a bunch of assorted candy and can do whatever they want for about 15 minutes. The newbies divide into groups, and each group watches one set of actors, recording what they do.

Paddy Colligan and Brittany Osland watch Tony Krus & Krysta Terry interacting with candy.

Tony Krus & Krysta Terry ‘trade’ while Tiana Elkins records their actions.

Next they rotate, and each group gets to map in what is left behind– the “material culture” if you will. This is pretty much equivalent to what archaeologists have to work with. Laura and I walk around asking leading questions like “So, do you notice any patterns? What could that be a result of?”

Dave Grant maps a candy scatter.

Then we get together, and the mappers (the archaeologists) get to describe what they saw, and what they think happened at the “site” based on what they saw. Then the people who watched the action (the ethnographers) say what they saw, and what they think it meant. After that, the actors get to say what they were really doing. And there is candy for everyone, lots of it.

It’s pretty interesting, can help students understand the limitations of both archaeology and ethnography, and also gets them thinking about what the things they see on a site might mean about past activity.

For a change of pace, we also go outside and practice excavating in the parking lot at my office. The newbies get to actually use trowels for the first time.

Paddy Colligan shows Brittany Osland how to use a trowel.

The whole crew excavating my parking lot.

Tiana Elkins excavating her first test.

The first to arrive were Brittany Osland and Shelia Oelrich, two volunteers who are good friends. They are originally from Soldotna, Alaska, although Britt is now based in Portland, Oregon. Neither of them are archaeologists, but they wanted to see Barrow, learn something about the people and the place, and try their hands at some archaeology. They came up on May 17th, and have been a huge help with the pre-season inventorying, organizing, and general straightening-up of field gear and the lab prior to the main season. They are old enough to drive the BASC truck assigned to the project, so can do supply purchases as well.

Heading out to the Nuvuk dig site in the BASC truck.

In addition, we currently have Paddy Colligan, who just finished an M.A. at Hunter College; Krysta Terry from Ontario, Canada, who just graduated from the University of Western Ontario and is planning to go on to graduate school; Dave Grant, who is working on a Masters at San Jose State in California (although he’s originally from Ontario too); Andrew Zipkin, who is an undergraduate at Cornell University; and Tony Krus, who just graduated from Hampshire College and will be going on to graduate school in the fall. On June 9th, Nadia Jackinsky-Horrell, a grad student at the University of Washington, will arrive to join us.

The BASC logistics staff took all the 4-wheelers (ATVs) out of winter storage and reassembled them. They have to take the windshields and shocks off to make them all fit into the limited indoor “warm” storage. Gear has been taken out, batteries have been charged, and software has been updated and loaded on to the ruggedized laptops for the season. The shovels, Pelican cases and so forth that we ordered are finally starting to arrive. Freight can be slow in the Arctic.

Our transit setup, complete with 4-wheeler, tripod, laptop, backpack, and assorted cases.

These carvings were found buried with Thule remains.

Anne Jensen at the Nuvuk archaeological site with the Exploratorium’s Robyn Higdon.

One of the largest questions in northern archaeology concerns the Thule people, ancestors to modern Iñupiaq people. How did the Thule people come to be in Alaska? Why did they spread rapidly to Greenland and Canada? Anne Jensen and Laura Thomas are part of a project that’s helping to answer these questions. They’re also working to save ancient remains from washing into the sea at the historic settlement of Nuvuk. Global warming is melting the sea ice, exposing more open water with waves that hit the coast for longer periods of time, especially in the fall. At the same time, storms and storm surges are fiercer. The result is an increase in erosion, which is causing more skeletal human remains to surface.

Laura Thomas at the Nuvuk dig site.

People abandoned Nuvuk in the 1940s. Most of it has already been lost to the ocean, but waves and ocean storms are uncovering graves, some 1,000 years old or older. Under the direction of Jensen and Thomas, local students have been working each summer to save their ancestors from an unwanted reburial at sea. With the encouragement of the Iñupiaq Elders, scientific studies are carried out before reburial at a protected site. These studies may help in understanding Thule origins and their adaptations to climate change.

The Nuvuk Archaeological Project crew excavating.