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<< Other Photo Pages >> Nunalleq - Ancient Village or Settlement in United States in Alaska

Submitted by bat400 on Wednesday, 28 August 2013  Page Views: 7628

DigsSite Name: Nunalleq
Country: United States
NOTE: This site is 216.448 km away from the location you searched for.

Region: Alaska Type: Ancient Village or Settlement
 Nearest Village: Quinhagak, AK
Latitude: 59.753000N  Longitude: 161.903W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
1 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
1 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
2

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Nunalleq
Nunalleq submitted by Andy B : Charlotta, one of the diggers displays what is most likely a transformational mask with a human-fox (or wolf) design Image credit: Nunalleq 2013 (Vote or comment on this photo)
Ancient Village in the Bethel Cenus Area, Alaska. Yup'ik Eskimo settlement on the Kanektok River near where it empties into the Bering Sea. This winter village is a multi-period prehistoric (or precontact) Yup’ik winter village site.

Finds are rapidly being uncovered as the arctic perafrost melts. Communial house sites (partially below ground square buildings of drift wood, covered by earth and snow) and many household artifacts have been found. Finds include ivory, woven grass, incredibly well preserved animal remains, animal fur and human hair.

The University of Aberdeen Department of Archaeology, in partnership with the village corporation Qanirtuuq, Inc. and the Yup’ik Eskimo village of Quinhagak, Alaska, is working to record archaeological sites threatened by rising sea levels along the Bering Sea.

Nunalleq means ‘the OldVillage’ in Yup’ik. and was occupied from 1350-1650AD, during the "Little Ice Age". The waterlogged frozen tundra preserves organic material to an incredible degree. Everything from grass ropes, salmon berry seeds and head lice, along with an abundance of wooden and lithic artefacts and faunal remains builds the knowledge of a Yup’ik prehistory that up until now has been very little known or studied.

Note: More spectacularly well preserved finds such as this human / animal transformational mask uncovered by the 2013 dig season. More in their illustrated dig diary
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Nunalleq
Nunalleq submitted by Andy B : Half of another ancient mask uncovered during the Nunalleq 2013 excavations Image credit: Nunalleq 2013 (Vote or comment on this photo)

Nunalleq
Nunalleq submitted by Andy B : A transformational mask with a human-fox (or wolf) design. It is the right size for a woman’s face, as the finder can verify. Image credit: Nunalleq 2013 (Vote or comment on this photo)

Nunalleq
Nunalleq submitted by Andy B : A trench from the Nunalleq 2013 excavations Image credit: Nunalleq 2013 (Vote or comment on this photo)

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Nearby Images from Flickr
20100718 Observing rural housing_energy
Quinhagak Sunset
School bus
Crossroads
Local store
Quinhagak school

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"Nunalleq" | Login/Create an Account | 3 News and Comments
  
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2013 Dig Season at Nunalleq Captured on Web by bat400 on Wednesday, 28 August 2013
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August 14, 2013: Just when the area B crew was starting to loose faith in their site’s potential this turned up. It is a complete full size mask with a dual human/wolf – or fox – face. In view of yesterday’s find of a wolf – or fox – female transformation doll, we think this might be a woman’s mask. It is also the right size for a woman’s face, as the finder can verify. Masks were used for many different ceremonial purposes, and could be of different size and design. They connected humans to the spiritual world, but the specific meaning behind a mask related to the mask’s creator and was special to fox-woman, hers or his story.

Masks were powerful spiritual objects, and when a mask had served its purpose it was often broken or otherwise destroyed, it is therefore quite unusual to find complete masks. Masks were decorated with different attachment and bangles, such as carved animals, hands and feathers. We have found several mask attachments at the site in the last days, and a number mask fragments, but this is the first whole mask. It is possibly the oldest complete Yup’ik mask in existence. When cleaning the mask back in the lab, Rick detected traces of silver paint made out of ground mica, so when in use it would have glimmered in silver.

More remarkable finds in the 2013 dig diary at nunalleq.wordpress.com
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Blackhole of Alaskan archaeology illuminated by bat400 on Wednesday, 28 August 2013
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Unfamiliar items washed out on the beach near the Bering Sea village of Quinhagak about five years ago. The curiosities were clearly indigenous to the area, with designs similar to those found in the Yup'ik Eskimo culture of the region. And they were wood, a material that usually decays after a few decades. Yet they were also old.
The question was: How old?

Warren Jones, general manager of Qanirtuuq Inc., the village corporation, took some pictures and sent them to anthropologist Rick Knecht.
Knecht, who helped establish museums in Kodiak and Unalaska, recognized the artifacts as prehistoric - that is, before contact between the Yup'ik and Europeans in the 1800s. Knecht, a former University of Alaska Fairbanks professor now working for the University of Aberdeen in Scotland examined the area and discussed the possibility of doing a dig with Jones.

The upshot was a partnership between Qanirtuuq and the Scottish university that is uncovering an unprecedented trove of archaeological treasure.

"This is easily the largest collection of pre-contact Yup'ik material anywhere," Knecht said, thousands of items dating from between 1350 and 1670.

Some of the most important pieces from previous years' digs are now on display at the King's Museum in Aberdeen, an exhibit titled "Nunalleq," Yup'ik for "the old village." It will remain on view through Sept. 7.

The grant for the work - $1.7 million funded by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council - anticipates that the discoveries will be returned to the region for display and study within a few years.

Teams of international volunteers working with local residents have found 8,000 of what Knecht calls "better artifacts." There are perhaps that many more fragments, all containing information about life in the area centuries ago. And every day, it seems, new and eye-popping tools or decorative items are retrieved from the ground.

There are carvings, weapons, woven grass, clothing, dolls, even haircut trimmings from long-departed inhabitants. "We found some amazing pieces on Saturday," Knecht said recently. "I've never seen anything like it."

The first test holes were dug in 2009. They were small, about 6 feet across, but the abundance of material showed that the site had been occupied for a long while and that the settlement likely consisted of 200-300 people.

The following year, the dig was expanded. This August between 15 and 20 volunteers from around the world joined Quinhagak residents in a "field school," currently excavating the site that now stretches for about 150 yards.

It's not just the amount of items found at the site that has Knecht excited; it's the quality and rarity of the materials.

"Because it's been in permafrost up until now, the level of preservation is just marvelous," he said. "Eighty percent of what we're finding is wood or other organics. A lot of them are preserved to the extent that they still have original paint on them. For all practical purposes, we're looking at new wood."

That's important because so many of the things used by the people of Nunalleq were made from wood and other organic materials. In most circumstances such items decompose within a century or so. Here, however, excavators have found intact wooden masks, bowls, bows, arrows and spears. "Not just the bone points, but the shafts," Knecht said.

"We have scraps of sealskin clothing with original needle holes," he said, "animal fur, little bodies of insects," and in one instance a mouse. "The grass basketry - sometimes the grass is still a little green. You can see it fade as oxygen hits it when it's uncovered. There's cordage, ropes made from grass and roots. It's very rare to find them."

The crew is also finding stone tools and clay pots, technologies that were abandoned early in the initial contact period. But even those durable items are poorly documented

Read the rest of this post...
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Race to save Alaskan Arctic archaeology by Anonymous on Wednesday, 12 September 2012
A recently discovered 500-year-old Alaskan settlement is rapidly disappearing into the Bering Sea. The exquisitely preserved frozen site provides a spectacular insight into the Yup'ik Eskimo culture.

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen are using isotope analyses on recovered Eskimo hair to investigate how humans adapted to rapid climate change in the Arctic village.

The Yup'ik culture was one of the last contacted Eskimo societies, but prevailed over an area three times the size of Scotland. Although very little had been known about the archaeology of their society, a team from the University of Aberdeen was brought in to help rescue thousands of artifacts that were being eroded out of the ground near the modern village of Quinhagak.

"It's probably the most spectacularly well preserved and valuable site in terms of information content I've ever seen", Dr Rick Knecht, of the University of Aberdeen, said.

"In the first couple of years we found about 7,000 pieces, including items like ivory, woven grass, incredibly well preserved animal remains, animal fur and even human hair."

But the means by which the bounty of discoveries has been released from the soil is also the reason why the site is being eradicated.

"It's preserved by permafrost, and the permafrost is melting due to climate change. As it melts, it exposes the very soft soil to marine erosion: the shoreline retreats and the sites get damaged," explained Dr Knecht, who has been working in Alaska for more than 30 years.

"This year, we were shocked by the amount of destruction. There were artifacts as big as tables thrown up on the bank by a single storm on a high tide.

Already thousands of artefacts have been unearthed "These storm periods are now lasting weeks longer because of the lack of ice cover. The sea ice cover is at a record low right now and continuing to drop, and every time that happens the site is at more at risk," the researcher told the BBC.

Ironically, the artifacts released by the effects of sea ice reduction may help the scientists better understand how the Yup'ik people adapted to a rapidly changing climate.

By analyzing extremely well preserved hair found at the site, the team hopes to understand how the people of Nunalleq altered their behaviour with a changing environment.

"Chemical signatures, the isotopes in your food, become present in your hair. You are what you eat," explained Dr Kate Britton, also of the University of Aberdeen.

"By analysing strands of the hair of multiple individuals, we're getting this picture of a very mixed and generalized economy incorporating salmon, caribou and other animal species.

You are what you eat: Hair samples give clues to past diets and behaviours "This is in the earlier phase of the site and we're now working on the younger sites which will give us a clear idea of how the people's diet was adapting to changes in climatic conditions which would have affected species availability," she said.

"We can take this evidence and get an idea of what sort of changes were happening in the Bering Sea ecosystem and what sorts of changes were going on in terms of people's subsistence."

For more, see the article by Nick Crumpton at http://www.bbc.co.uk.
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