Mud and Guts

Archaeology has always been associated with adventure and grand tales of who’s been where and collected what. Indiana Jones inevitably comes to mind as do other treasure hunters or the materials they might find. The exotic and the childhood dreams of glory draw us all. And yet, in reality, there is a lot more dirt and a few more mosquitoes than the films were willing to grant their audience.

I have to say that I absolutely love my job. I have never seen an ounce of gold nor have I been to the jungle (yet) but I do love digging in the dirt (whether I recover anything or not). And for a secret bit of archaeological insight, you don’t find artifacts, you recover them. In order to ‘ find’ something, it had to have been lost.

Most artifacts recovered in my line of work are nails. I have currently cataloged well over three hundred nails from a site that I worked at for a mere three days this summer. If you love nails, you might consider archaeology as a career path. They are measured from head to tip and the length of their shank indicates their pennyweight or the amount that was paid per nail. They were sold in bulk prior to the current sell-by-number mode and the average weight was used to determine about how much would be paid.

But enough of that. Data is only so interesting to the passerby.

You want dirt?

I had plenty of that this summer.

Our first forays into the area that we were looking at were fairly uneventful. We began with foot surveys and then, once we’d figured out the scope of the area we were going to try and excavate, we started to bring in our gear by mule. Not old fashion mules mind you, but fourwheelers designed to carry up to four people plus gear. Trust me, that’s all the mule you want to deal with. Sites have their own problems.

Just so you have an idea of what kind of things we drag up bear infested mountains and through woods swarming with mosquitoes…

Right, and that doesn’t include the buckets, the actionpackers, the paperwork, or the copious amounts of dope (for the bugs) that we hauled. Where the mules couldn’t go, we carried it by hand.

The glory is for those of us who revel in hard work and getting our hands deep into soil that hasn’t been touched in thousands of years. There’s danger, sure, if you’re out in the middle of nowhere which, in Alaska, there’s a fairly good chance you will be. But if cautionary steps are taken, the danger is avoidable. Bears are easily scared by loud noise, most moose are fairly easily spooked, and caribou (while fairly unintelligent creatures) are pretty easily convinced to vacate the area.

Sites aren’t always easily identifiable. For instance, this:

Doesn’t really look like a site does it? Well it’s not actually, but it could be… The fact of the matter is that determining whether there’s a site here would involve test pits, local tales, or aerial photographs along with good old fashioned ground surveying.  I’m just making a point, I suppose, that not all sites look like Machu Picchu. Sometimes the hints are a lot more subtle.

So my first excavation of the summer was a burned cabin from the early forties that was associated with early Alaskan mining. You might wonder why archaeologists were involved. Or maybe not. We were asked to do the work both as a teaching tool for high school students (through the Alaska Summer Research Academy) and for one of the archaeological databases that most states maintain through various land programs. The National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management are the major two. Our purpose was to primarily not for recovery but to determine the state of the site itself. The site was comprised of several cabins, some of which were still standing and others of which were only foundation impressions covered in chin high fireweed.

As you might imagine we didn’t have to dig very deep to hit rock bottom (so to speak). The majority of the data lay within the top 15cm of soil.

This was one of the more interesting shots, where on the right you can see some of the burned planks that may have made up a small porch. Generally, the pits varied depending on what area of the cabin we were in. Window glass, roofing nails, and bottle glass were among the more popular recoveries while others hit pay dirt with a hatchet (sans shaft), a pennyweight for measuring gold, a bit of beadwork that was melted together beautifully or a key that one can only assume was for a chest, the only remains of which were a few hinges and a handful of zippers and buttons.

For the most part, this is a decent representation of what we gathered:

I was overwhelmed with the number of nails that I would be required to measure and catalog. There’s a lot you can tell about a nail. Has it been used or is it straight at the head and along the shank? Was it bent and used as a hook? What kind of nail is it? Roofing, finishing? Was it hand cut, machine cut? Is it wire? Goodness, there’s just so much to know. People write academic papers on such things as few people even think about when they apply hammer to nail. I have certainly never thought about who would come after me to dig up all the remnants of my short existence, but one day they might and who knows what they’ll find out about me.

For my second excursion of the summer, I and a coworker of mine were flown up into the Brooks Range to relocate sites that were mapped out in the seventies. Needless to say, they didn’t have GPS units and their mapping techniques don’t always match up to ours. The topographic maps of the time were accurate enough as were their triangulations, however, when transferring these to satellite imagery our GPS often times told us that we had just walked across a lake or over a mountain. Due to this, we were as much trying to locate a site as we were any specific site.

But with scenery as gorgeous as this:

We didn’t mind walking around too much. Just for the record though, that haze isn’t mist or fog, it’s smoke. Interior Alaska gets it every summer from the mass of forest fires we get. It delayed a lot of flights this summer and cut a quite a few trips short.

Much of what we did was survey, we didn’t dig test pits (we didn’t need to because it was primarily on the surface) or collect any artifacts, this was merely a search and report excursion. We wanted to know how accurate the data from thirty-some-odd years ago was and if there was anything that they might have missed. All those flags were to help locate where artifact scatters were which might lead us to conclude that we had in fact found our site. We would then record anything we saw (what kind of artifact, what the vegetation looked like, was the ground disturbed by animals, etc) , take photographs of the area for relocation purposes, and input our data into the GPS.  What we found stayed where it was and we moved on to the next site.

Sometimes it’s easy and sites find you.

The ‘rock’ in the foreground is a simple Inuksuq which were used to indicate areas of plenty for hunting or in this case caribou. One close encounter led to my coworker growing antlers and a very confused yearling. He ran off once he decided that we were too weird to be his relatives.

That giant black ridge in the background is chert, the primary rock type used for tool making in this (or any) area. Chert is plentiful in most of Alaska and can be used to make any number of tools from scrapers the size of your hand to microblades that are sharp enough (after several thousand years) to slice your finger open. Personally my favorites are made from obsidian though, of which there are only about 8 known sources.

A lot of what we located looked like this:

There aren’t any obvious tools and to most this looks a bit like a pile of rocks, which it is, but there are a few modified if you know what you’re looking for. The darker rocks are all chert flakes, some of them have lighter edges or striations. These are all the product of human modification and discard. These aren’t tools for the most part, they are simply what was left after the tool was finished. Obviously these are fairly large chunks and if the source of the rock weren’t so hugely visible, one might deduct from this that there is a source nearby.

More obvious tools we found are these:

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A utilized flake and a partial biface.

These are more typically thought of when discussing archaeology but are still not the first thought. More often then not the most commonly found tools are arrowheads dug up in the farmer’s fields. My grandfather had a pretty nice collection of them. Here in Alaska, the more common kind are likewise deeply embedded generally requiring up to a meters digging to retrieve. But with high mountain winds, 9 solid months of snow cover, and a bountiful source right next door, these sites have remained uncovered and virtually untouched for thousands of years.

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Well, except by little fellows like this one

Who’s den was right underneath one of our sites.

We finally got snowed out (in August) on our third day after locating 37 sites. Only about 20 of which were originally documented. Despite having to leave early, the trip was successful and we returned to the lab with much paperwork to complete.

When we’re not out gallivanting around the state, we work here:

At the weirdest looking building I’ve ever encountered, The Museum of the North in Fairbanks. I just have to say that the low tonight is supposed to be negative 47 degrees Fahrenheit. And man, I’m already shivering.

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