Pristine Yup'ik Finds in Southwestern Alaska Exposed by Climate Warming

Archaeologists in Alaska are doing "triage," trying to save what they can of artifacts of cultures (Yup'ik, Aleut, etc.) that are rapidly being exposed as the tundra melts and the water of the Bering Sea rises, washing away countless artifacts every day.

Southwest Alaska dig gives scientists rare window into Yup'ik culture
Published on October 7th, 2010
By ALEX DEMARBAN

What's being called the first large-scale excavation in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta has yielded a treasure trove of ancient Eskimo objects, and sparked a race against global warming along the eroding Bering Sea coast.

"In the time I'm giving this talk hundreds of artifacts are washing out to sea all over the delta region," said Rick Knecht, a longtime Alaska archaeologist now employed by the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

At the 700-year-old site near the village of Quinhagak -- called Nunalleq or Yup'ik for "old village site" -- workers have discovered dozens of sod homes just under the tundra.

They've recovered thousands of objects that had long been locked in ice. The list includes "miraculously preserved" bentwood bowls, knives with handles, whole clay pots, and carved figures, or "dolls," some with expressive faces caught in a smile or frown.

Sometimes, they pulled items from puddles of melted permafrost.

"It was melting as fast as we dug," Knecht said.

The items are placed in a waxy chemical immediately to protect them because they can crumble in minutes if they dry out.

The find includes what my have been a men's house, or qasgiq, a school where boys learned survival skills from men. Wood shavings lined the floor, perhaps dropped from carving lessons, a common guy activity.

"Boy toys" littered the large house -- model kayaks of wood, slate arrow blades still attached to shafts, harpoon points.

The women's tools, such as moon-shaped ulu knives for cutting through fish and bone-needles for sewing, were found elsewhere.

The excavators, including villagers and college students who raised money to make the trip, feel like they're up against global warming.

With the sea melting the coast and protective ice from artifacts, Quinhagak's village corporation, Qanirtuuq, with help from the Alaska Marine Grant Sea Advisory Program, called on Knecht for help. Kanektok River Adventures, a subsidiary of the corporation, also supported the project.

Knecht, known for helping build Native museums in Kodiak and Unalaska, said he and others found the buried village by beachcombing for prehistoric artifacts in 2009 and following the trail of objects.

That was the first day. Amazing discoveries came quickly, he said.

The site, two miles south of Quinhagak and 450 miles west of Anchorage, isn't the only one in danger of vanishing from the delta.

"These layers in the ground that are pages in your history book are being torn out by this sea level rise," Knecht told a room of villagers from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. More than 200 villagers gathered this week for the annual convention of the Association of Village Council Presidents, which provides social services in the region.

The vast delta, with more than 50 communities scattered along the sea and rivers, is one of the world's largest areas unexplored by archaeologists, he said.

The Yup'ik artifacts known to man were collected recently, within 150 years, often by explorers gathering items for museum archives, Knecht said.

Nunalleq is already providing clues into Yup'ik pre-history and the broader Eskimo culture that includes Aleuts and Inupiat, such as where they originated. More will be discovered.

"We need to know how deeply rooted this culture is," Knecht said.

An analysis of hair strands -- apparently the remains of haircuts in the possible men's house -- showed that people ate caribou and salmon year-round.

"They had a steady supply, from drying and storing," he said.

Leadership in the village of Quinhagak agreed today to let Knecht do DNA analyses of the hair, which might tell if the piles of locks came only from males. If so, it could be a good sampling of the village's male population.

Teams of diggers also found many big animal shoulder bones that may have been used as snow shovels. Woven reed mats were found in house walls, helping keep out the sod. What Knect called "wooden tally sticks" probably kept scores in games.

One treasure included a small ivory carving of a head that may have been lashed to a kayak or some other object, judging from a series of holes in the back. The face contains a smaller face below it, the inua or yua, the Eskimo motif representing the spirit of all things, Knecht said.

There were signs the residents had contact with other cultures, including polished coal beads that may have followed trade routes from the Gulf of Alaska, and calcite lip plugs, or labrets, found in the Aleutian Chain.

The items are being analyzed at labs in Scotland, but they belong to the Yup'ik people, he said. They will return to Quinhagak, a village of 700.

AVCP hopes to build a repository and a museum to store artifacts in Bethel, said Myron Naneng, president.

The repository will give young people the chance to see the richness of their culture.

"By having a repository, you'll be in control of your own cultural heritage. That's a basic human right that you need to have," Knecht said.

Other villages aware of sites that may be disappearing should contact Knecht or Steve Street, AVCP archaeologist, at (907) 543-7355. Knecht's email address is r.knecht@abdn.ac.uk.

The archaeologists are working on a plan to "triage the sites," Knecht said. That includes training villagers as local archaeologists.

Linguistics Again - The Yenseic-Na Dene Connection

Prior post. I found this story at Mike Ruggeri's "The Ancient Americas Breaking News": From The Anchorage Daily News Distant Native languages bridge Bering Sea Siberian culture's words have echo in North America By GEORGE BRYSONgbryson@adn.com Published: March 4th, 2008 12:41 AM Last Modified: March 4th, 2008 03:31 AM A remote population of a few hundred indigenous Siberians who live thousands of miles west of Alaska speak a language that appears to be an ancient relative of more than three dozen Native languages in North America, experts say. A panel of respected linguists who met in Anchorage on Friday are hailing new research that links the Old World language of Ket, still spoken sparingly along the Yenisei River in western Siberia, and the sprawling New World family of Na-Dene languages -- a broad grouping that encompasses the many Athabascan tribes in Alaska, along with the Tlingit and Eyak people, as well as Indian populations in western Canada and the American Southwest, including the Navajo and the Apache. Other than Siberian Yupik, a regional Eskimo dialect that straddles the Bering Strait, a connection between North American and Asian language families had never before been demonstrated. The research by University of Western Washington linguist Edward Vajda, who spent 10 years deciphering the Ket language, drew upon parallel work by three Alaskans -- Jeff Leer, Michael Krauss and James Kari, professors of linguistics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks -- who independently detailed patterns in Na-Dene languages. Establishing that two such far-distant language groups are closely related is both demanding and rare in the exacting field of historical linguistics, according to participants who attended a language symposium at the annual meeting of the Alaska Anthropological Association. That Interior Indian languages spoken in North America are related to languages spoken in Asia has long been assumed, since other fields of science have widely concluded that the Americas weren't populated until ice age hunters migrated across a temporary land bridge from the old world to the new some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. And as early as 1923, other linguists speculated specifically about a genetic link between the Yeniseic family of languages spoken along the Yenisei River (of which Ket is now the only surviving member) and the Na-Dene family, spoken in North America. Ten years ago, American linguist Merritt Ruhlen did so again after producing a list of 36 cognates -- comparable words in two languages that sound alike and mean the same thing. But producing lists of similar-sounding words isn't sufficient evidence to establish a real genetic relationship between two languages, declared Bernard Comrie, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, speaking at the conference. That's because cognates can also occur by accident or chance -- when selective words are adopted by travelers from unrelated languages, or when words have a universal appeal. [Yeah, okay. So, what are the odds that this happened 15,000 years ago in a remote region of Siberia???] What makes the new finding so exciting, Comrie said, is that it's based on complex and verifiable morphologies that show how certain Ket words were systematically altered to create Athabascan words -- or vice versa (the research doesn't speculate on which language came first or when). Vajda began studying the Ket language firsthand in the 1990s after the Iron Curtain fell and he interviewed Ket speakers in the southwestern Siberia city of Tomsk, as well as in Germany. "There is no road and no train," Vajda said in an interview last week in Anchorage, here to address the symposium. "You have to go by steamboat or helicopter to get there." Through his research and interviews, Vajda determined that there are about 1,200 people who say they are Ket, including about 200 people who speak the language. But only about 100 speak Ket fluently, Vajda said, and nearly all of them are now older than 50. "They were the last hunters of north Asia that didn't have any domesticated animals that they used for food," he said. "They moved around, they didn't live in the same place." That came to an end when the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union forced the Ket to live in villages. Now their traditional lifestyle is nearly gone, Vajda said -- and their language is disappearing too. While trying to capture it before it vanishes altogether, Vajda gained a new understanding about the peculiarities of Ket verbs, suffixes and tonalities -- which are unlike any of the other Siberian languages to the east. Comparing what he learned with research conducted independently in Alaska, Vajda began to find words the two languages had in common. A news release issued this week by the Alaska Native Language Center at UAF concurs, noting language similarities "too numerous and displaying too many idiosyncratic parallels to be explained by anything other than common descent." Among linguistic scholars elsewhere who've reviewed Vajda's paper in its draft form and reacted favorably so far is Dr. Heinrich Werner of Bonn, Germany -- a world authority in the Ket language, whose work Vajda cited and incorporated into his own, along with that of the Alaskans. Vajda thinks his research might be a door-opener for scientists in other fields, including those who work in human genetics and archaeology, to proceed with additional comparisons of the two cultures. He says it also points out the necessity and urgency to record dying languages before they disappear.