Rachel Gill checking in for one final time, this time from the comfort of home. This post sums up the end of the dig and my reflections.

Profiles:

The last time we chatted, pits in Block B were on the mind. We finally reached the bottom of those pits in some areas, mostly along the north wall of Block B. It was getting down to the wire, the last few days of our excavation season, and we needed to see the profile.

Quick digression: a profile is the view of the wall and all the layers that we have dug out. Typically, we measure and draw these on the last day in order to get a picture of how all the layers in the stratigraphy come together and how they looked before we took it all out of the ground.

Profile example: the north wall of Block B - The Pit! Note the thick orange ash (Level 2) on the left, which dates to 3800 years ago. The black charcoal is the fill of the pit.

This profile allowed us to see the pit as it would have been if we hadn't dug everything out. A thick black layer curved in the shape of a 'U' dominated the right of the north wall, and the orange ash of L2 was virtually absent in that portion of the wall, as if the previous residents had dug out the ash and tossed it somewhere else to make their smoke pit.

Students Ryan, Kate, Alexandria, Rachel, and Professor
Catherine West, mapping and drawing the features and profile in Block B

While we uncovered the majority of the charcoal and rock pit fill, we did not have time to dig out the walls of the pit. The plan for next year is to remove the walls and the base of the pit to see what lies beneath.

What else was happening at the Kashevaroff Site?

To determine the extent of the site, the last week was not only filled with frantic digging in the two main excavations, but a few test pits scattered around the site. A test pit is just what it sounds like: a 1 meter by 1 meter hole in the ground used to see if 1) there was any kind of human activity and 2) how the stratigraphy compares to the rest of the site. We ultimately decided on three test pits, one far to the north past the main grid, another far to the south on a small knoll past Block B and the smoke pits, and one right in the middle of the two. For the sake of simplicity, we will call these 201, 301, and 401 respectively.

Students Sami Kassel and Hannah Wellman
after completing test pit 301

201 and 301 suggested the site stretches a long way. 201 looked similar to the 2X2 grid completed much earlier in the season next to Block A: very shallow with defined layers but nothing much underneath L3. 301 was much deeper, but the layers were less well defined. In fact, everything below the orange ash of L2 was muddled and confused, a heterogeneous mixture of sediments that weren't identifiable as any specific layer. We expected to find glacial till at the bottom, but we found glacial outwash instead. This is basically slate sand that was deposited by glacial runoff.

401 looks like a HOUSE! This test pit is right between the two main grids, and was by far the most interesting. Below the L2 orange ash, we found what appeared to be the partial floor of a house. This indicates that not only were people smoking their food, but perhaps they were living nearby. Next season, we hope to open up the house entirely to see its features and perhaps date is specifically.

Sod quarrying might explain the discrepancies in the stratigraphy and depths to glacial material among the pits -- in order to built their houses, smoke pits, other structures, and what have you, the residents were digging up sod from one part of the site and moving it to other parts. This would account for the very shallow dirt and complete absence of some layers in areas and the incredible depth in others. Hopefully we can test this hypothesis with further excavation.

Reflections

Over all, we did find some incredible artifacts and incredible potential for this site to hold answers to questions not yet discovered.

Student Rachel Gill mid-excavation

On a personal level, I just want to thank all of the amazing people that made this possible. I learned more than I thought possible about the Alutiiq people, their past and present, and myself as a student, a person, and a future archaeologist.

Rachel Gill back with you again for just a glimpse into the vast Alutiiq history and how our small site fits into that enormous block of time...Okay, so maybe this won't be a history of all time, but archaeologists have literally dug into almost 8,000 years of obvious human occupation on Kodiak using both stratigraphy and artifact recovery.

A (brief) vocabulary lesson:

The recovery of certain types of artifacts can tell a seasoned investigator what time period they come from and can lead to certain conclusions about household behavior, hunting techniques, or even diet. The word stratigraphy may only be familiar to you if you are an archaeologist or a geologist. At its most basic, it refers to the order and position of the layers of dirt we dig through. These layers can indicate certain time periods of occupation, can offer a way to date artifacts above or below a certain date-able layer, or they can even indicate specific activities.

Example of the stratigraphy found at Salonie Creek, Kodiak Island - note the thick 1912 Katmai volcanic ash at the top, covering the archaeological layers below.

Some layers can be easily distinguished from one another, but sometimes it takes much more skill and practice to be able to tell the two thinly divided sediments apart. In Women's Bay on Kodiak, each layer has its own name and defining characteristics, and many of these layers are common across nearly all sites. For example, the Katmai ash that blanketed the region in 1912 after the eruption of Novarupta. Those layers that are unique to the site itself would be the floor of a house or a fire pit. During our excavation, each layers has received a designation - L1, L2, L3, etc. (The 'L' in this case stands for, you guessed it, "level". Please hold in your surprise!)

Alutiiq culture history:

The Kashevaroff site is just one of many around Women's Bay on Kodiak Island, and we hope it will shed light on what life was like around the Bay. At the Kashevaroff Site, we uncovered the sod and the Katmai ash, and found L1 below. The top of L1 is dark brown sediment, and seems to contain Koniag-era artifacts. The Koniag period is thought to be from around 200 to 650 years ago. Typically, houses are multi-roomed and are frequently found on salmon streams, and they yield salmon harpoons carved from bone and ground slate ulus, or fish knives. Very few of the artifacts we have found at our site have been from this period, so the occupation must have been brief.

Bayonet shaft used for hunting sea mammals - this is made of ground slate, which is common in the area around the Kashevaroff site.

Deeper in the site, into the bottom of L1, we are finding evidence of the earlier Kachemak phase. This phase is much broader, from 650 to nearly 4000 years ago. Circular houses were built from sod (bricks of soil, grass, ash, and roots dug up from the ground’s surface), making their walls easy to spot and excavate. On the floor of the house, archaeologists will typically find a central hearth for cooking, ground slate for making sharp projectile points, and stone net-sinkers...and we have begun to find evidence of these artifacts.

Ground slate point - the lines may be the hunter's identifying mark!

Though we have not found any, in sites with better organic preservation archaeologists might find carved bone tools for hunting sea mammals and wooden artifacts used for decoration. Unfortunately, these poorly preserved artifacts are only found where the acidity of the volcanic ash falls (like the dark brown, weathered ash we found in L2) is balanced with basic materials, like decomposing clam shells. So far in our excavation, the Kachemak period has yielded red chert (a kind of stone that comes from the west side of Kodiak Island and is good for making chipped stone tools) and ground slate for making points. We’ve also uncovered a few beautiful points and tools themselves.

Red chert stone tool from the Kachemak period - this is probably a small knife that would have been hafted into a bone handle.

As we move further down in the stratigraphy, L2 is what we like to call a "dead zone" because it is incredibly rare to find artifacts in this reddish brown ash fall. This is because it is just that: an ash fall that has been dated to about 3800 years ago and must have smothered the site when it fell. We can use this ash to help date the occupation at our site.

The really old stuff is in L3. This level contains artifacts dating anywhere from 3800 years ago (before the ash fell) to 7,500 BP, when the Ocean Bay period started. Ocean Bay I and II are the earliest occupations of Kodiak, and are characterized by slate and chipped stone tools and evidence of more ephemeral housing: rock rings to hold down tent covers and small post holes. We may find stone oil lamps for light and the house floors are often marked by red ochre stains, a pigment ground from naturally occurring mineral. These earliest occupants hunted a vast array of marine life and most times, Ocean Bay sites are located very near to the coast line. The most distinctive tool type found in this time period is called a microblade, so once you find of these small hunting tools, you know exactly where you stand in the timeline. These microblades were inserted into a wooden lance and used for hunting. As of now, we haven’t uncovered any obvious Ocean Bay artifacts, but the dig is still young and we have our fingers crossed.

Example of a microblade from the Ocean Bay I period

Hopefully our small site will shed a little more light on this complex and involved history by offering information about the earlier periods of the Alutiiq world.