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<< Text Pages >> Snake River Sandspit Pithouses - Ancient Village or Settlement in United States in Alaska

Submitted by bat400 on Wednesday, 27 June 2007  Page Views: 7842

Multi-periodSite Name: Snake River Sandspit Pithouses
Country: United States
NOTE: This site is 234.921 km away from the location you searched for.

Region: Alaska Type: Ancient Village or Settlement
Nearest Town: Nome, AK
Latitude: 64.500250N  Longitude: 165.428638W
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
Destroyed Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
1 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
no data

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External Links:

Ancient Village or Settlement in Alaska.
Pre-Contact Alaskan village. Surveys conducted prior to port upgrades found pre-contact pit houses. The finds dating to 1700s, including rare Late Thule pottery and a tool cache, have been curated and preserved.

Photos from the 1800's show a native village on the Sand Spit at Nome. There has been argument about when Inupiat Eskimo settlement took place; were the people attracted to the "modern" town and its opportunities, or had they always been living at the mouth of the Snake River? Recent find show that the settlement had existed prior to contact from the outside world.

Note: See attached article for descriptions of the finds and community involvment.
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Nearby Images from Flickr
N15GA c/n UE-37
N349TA c/n 349
N396TC c/n 32501
N2793P c/n 916
N3781P c/n 18-4671
N8203T c/n 50703

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"Snake River Sandspit Pithouses" | Login/Create an Account | 1 comment
  
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Corp of Engineers finds pre-contact houses in Alaska by bat400 on Wednesday, 27 June 2007
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Contrary to popular view, Inupiat Eskimos may have lived on the Snake River Sandspit in Nome, Alaska, long before the late 1800s Gold Rush brought thousands of people to the area. New evidence of early Native culture was recently uncovered by Alaska District.

An excavation by Alaska District archeologist Margan Grover proves that Eskimos were in the Nome area 300 years earlier than thought. A pottery cup was among the artifacts found at the site. A small carved figurine also was among the artifacts found at the Snake River Sandspit.

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contractor, working on a project to improve navigation at the Nome harbor, exposed a semi-subterranean house in 2005. Alaska District archaeologist Margan Grover excavated a second semi-subterranean house and trash midden (garbage dump) in 2006, recovering tools, pottery, carvings, and animal bones radiocarbon dated at about AD 1700.

While not old compared to other parts of the world, the 300-year-old find is significant because it reflects Native culture before contact with other people. Alaska was discovered by Russian explorers in 1741, at least 40 years after the Inupiat built these houses and crafted these tools. The archaeological evidence indicates that Native people lived at Nome long enough to build homes rather than just camping to hunt and fish.

While contractors lined the entrance channel with rock in 2006, Ms. Grover began excavation. The National Historic Preservation Act requires that historical and archaeological discoveries at construction sites be removed, catalogued and conserved. To keep the construction project on schedule as much as possible, Ms. Grover worked long hours and enlisted local Eskimo tribal members and community volunteers to help excavate the sites. Two Alaska District archaeology student hires, Helen Lindemuth and Aaron Wilson, also helped.

Ms. Grover says that the most exciting artifacts found at the sites are a "little man" the size of a small doll but more intricately carved, and an intact pottery cup. She has never seen a figure like the four-inch man carved from ivory at an archaeological site. The cup is rare because people during the Late Western Thule period (1,050 years ago to about AD 1850) did not have kilns to fire their pottery. They fired their clay at a lower temperature in hot coals, resulting in fragile pieces. No one has ever seen complete pre-contact pottery from an archaeological site in Alaska.

Ms. Grover said a tool cache is another important find because it has a complete set of hunting tools for the time period. The cache includes a net gauge for making fish nets, spearheads, harpoons, and tools made from wood, caribou antler, stone, bone, and ivory.

For more, including information on Pre-Contact culture in this area of Alaska, and the community involvment in the display of the artifacts, see the

Pat Richardson for Army.mil News.
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