The boat pictured on the cover of this newspaper sat on a bluff overlooking the Beaufort Sea when it was photographed in the summer of 2008. It’s almost certainly turned to driftwood and dust by now, swept away by waves after the bluff collapsed beneath it.
Scientists from the University of Colorado took photographs of the boat while on a geography expedition of Alaska’s Arctic shoreline. The scientists weren’t looking for artifacts of twentieth-century whaling crews. They were geographers doing a simple but high-tech and detailed GPS survey of the coast. They were gathering data that could be added to climate change computer models or used to help with coastline construction in the Arctic.
During an expedition in 2007, two boats, some small dugout buildings (possibly freezers or a work sheds) and a few above-ground summer huts were at the site, geographer Irina Overeem writes in an email from Colorado. “The two boats were closer to shore on the bluff. Over the summer of 2008 one boat disappeared into the Beaufort Sea. We visited the site in early August [of 2009] and I am speculating the other boat is now lost as well,” Overeem says.
The Colorado team has measured coastal erosion near the old whaling site for three years. Overeem says the area loses ground as fast as 30 meters per year, and consistently around 15 meters per year.
Coastal erosion is constant everywhere the land meets the sea. But in Arctic and sub-Arctic terrain, where the bluffs are often composed of a mix of soft soil and ice, erosion has accelerated in recent years. Call it global warming or climate change or the faddish, freak storm-centered term “global weird-ing”—by any name, it spells doom for countless small artifacts like the boat in the photograph, and for old village sites, trading posts and hunting sites that link Alaskans to the past.
For archeologists, erosion can be a mix of blessing and curse, because it often reveals items that give notice to a rich site for digging—say, a spearhead or fire pit or even a body preserved by ice-bound soil. In Alaska, stories that have made headlines in the last couple decades have included the discovery of a mukluk sticking out of the mud, but still attached to a long-ago buried man. That body, as reported in 1986 in the Anchorage Daily News, was buried sometime before contact with white whalers. It rested on a bed of baleen with two leather satchels of personal possessions.
That same newspaper story references a 1982 find—this one an entire house preserved with bodies of two women and three children, but not in graves. The theory was that the house may have been crushed during a winter storm by a giant slab of sea ice that pushed aground suddenly.
In both cases, newspaper reports feature scientists scrambling to glean information before the sea takes away the find.
“The problem is that these things are revealed so fast,” says Alaska state archeologist Dave McMahan. “Some of these materials are so fragile that if you don’t get to them and recover them within a year or so, you can’t preserve them.”
Anne Jensen, an anthropologist from Barrow, knows well the double-edged nature of erosion in her line of work. Abandoned village spots are easy to recognize on the tundra bluffs, Jensen says. The Inupiaq were masterful with insulation. They packed sod, moss and grass into roofs crafted with driftwood and whalebones to cover dugout winter homes.
“They’re these big old house mounds. They’re a pretty obvious part of the landscape,” Jensen says. If a person is near one and doesn’t see it, Jensen says with a sharp flurry of wit, “you should pretty much give up and find some work to do that doesn’t require eyesight.”
Jensen used the nautical term “fetch” to explain the reason erosion has sped up. The word is used to describe the distance over which wind blows on ocean waves, imparting its energy into them. “If it’s blowing two miles from ice to the shore, that’s one thing. If you have a hundred miles to put that energy into the waves, then you have a different story—a big storm surge,” she says.
The Colorado geographers describe much the same thing. As the distance between fragile, permafrost-bound bluffs and summer sea ice grows larger, a strong wind has a longer fetch to create bigger waves.
Over the last few summers, Jensen has worked to move gravesites from an eroding village site called Nuvuk, which means “the point” in English and is called Point Barrow on maps (the farthest north you can get and still be in the United States). It’s about seven miles from Barrow. Even the road used to get there suffers from battering by waves, she says.
The dig is important to the community of Barrow for several reasons, Jensen says, not the least of which is that the people buried in Nuvuk’s old graveyard are likely ancestors of the people helping Jensen dig the bodies and catalogue artifacts.
“The bodies never leave Barrow,” Jensen says. Instead, scientists fly to there to study artifacts buried with the people.
An exception was made for DNA samples, shipped Outside to prove whether Barrow residents are, in fact, direct descendents of people who lived at Nuvuk. To Alaskans, it would seem to go without saying that residents of Nuvuk simply moved out of the path of erosion and re-settled at Barrow. We know the point was occupied until the 1950s.
The big question is whether it was occupied continuously for thousands of years.
“There’s a theory that people just left Alaska and went to Greenland for about 400 or 500 years,” says Jensen. “Then they came back and just happened to speak the same language and use the same tools.”
The theory, proposed by twentieth century anthropologists, is based on what anthropologists call the “Thule period” and “Thule migration.” It holds that the Thule people are culturally distinct ancestors of several populations around the circumpolar Arctic, including the Inupiaq of Alaska and the Inuit of Greenland, who speak similar dialects of the same language even today. During the Thule period, the theory goes, the people left Alaska migrating eastward.
Anthropologists expend a great deal of effort parsing out shifts from one culture to its successors, and assigning them names. In Alaska, the old-school theory goes, a culture called Birnik was replaced by Thule about 1,000 years ago. About the same time, the people left the northwest corner of Alaska. In short, they didn’t become Inupiaq until they had been away about four centuries, making a cultural shift from Birnik to Thule to Inuit, Inupiaq and other modern Arctic cultures.
Jensen figures modern science can shatter that theory. She actually builds a 3-D computer record of where artifacts are found. Proximity—where one object is in relation to another—is very important for interpreting archeological data. Each day at the end of the dig data is backed up on separate computer flash drives, so more than one four-wheeler rider is carrying the data back to Barrow.
Jensen hopes current Alaska projects, possibly the dig at Nuvuk, can prove the Alaska Arctic has permanently occupied for thousands of years. “It’s really hard to draw the line between late-Birnik and early-Thule,” she says. “Of course there are basic cultural changes as you move along, but [the old-school timeline] is all based on protecting a type.”
There’s quite a bit at stake in terms of Inupiat heritage. For one thing, earlier anthropologists shipped those transitional Thule/Birnik artifacts Outside. They even took the remains of 85 Arctic people (though none from Nuvuk) to the Smithsonian Institute. For the last 17 years, Inupiat, through the Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corporation in Barrow, have been in a back-and-forth petitioning and correspondence battle with Smithsonian over the artifacts and remains.
Parts of the Smithsonian collection have been repatriated—there’s a law that requires it, if a museum accepts federal funds and if that museum holds artifacts claimed by an existing recognized tribe—but Jensen didn’t have hard facts on how many items have been returned. She says it’s a trickle, and mostly stuff the Smithsonian and the Inupiat have found it easy to agree upon. In some cases, archeologists took notes decades ago that have been used as proof. “They even had field notes that say there was flesh still on the bones, so this was real recent and everybody could clearly see [the bodies] were close relatives to the people who live there now.”
For archeologists and anthropologists, just finding an object isn’t really enough to determine its significance, or its usefulness in describing the story of the people who left it behind. As Jensen’s meticulous work in documenting the proximity and physical context of her finds suggests, those details are critical, too. That’s one of the things that makes archeology, and the anthropology that rests on it, so vulnerable to erosion. When objects fall from a bluff, they are reshuffled. Their proximity to one another is lost. Eons can be jumbled into a pile that tells us only that people once lived there, but not how they lived, or how long they stayed. If Nuvuk washes into the Arctic Ocean too quickly, Jensen’s challenge to the dominant Thule migration theory may never get the evidence it needs.
Coastal erosion and climate change are hot topics right now among anthropologists and archeologists, says McMahan, the state archeologist. His job at the state includes reviewing permit applications for archeological digs. The state of Alaska has an inventory that lists 35,000 archeological sites, he says. “That’s not to say that all of them are super important, it’s more like a planning document.”
McMahan tells of a group of Canadian scientists with a method of looking for new discoveries using satellite imagery that tracks glacial retreats. They look for likely routes that people may have traveled. “Ice fields are melting back for the first time in thousands of years and revealing some organic materials,” he says. Sometimes complete hunting arrows have been found, with the wood still intact. Archeologists interested in those migration and travel routes need to get to the artifacts quickly.
He says one of the problems with erosion is more contemporary. “There are not only a lot of archeological sites, but a lot of community cemeteries that are in danger," he says. He ticks off a list of communities where graves will likely be moved—Port Heiden Dillingham, Nanwhalek and Old Afognak—often the graves are unmarked and without surviving records of who is buried there.
Many of the communities have small budgets, McMahan says, and the state Office of History and Archeology has little budget to visit and lend advice. “In general, we don’t have a travel budget to send even one person out there, and moving an entire cemetery can be a monumental task for these small communities,” he says.
Jensen recalls that one Arctic shoreline site was swept away after archeologists chose it for a dig. “It was [from] maybe 1850, right when the people were beginning to adopt Yankee whaling techniques,” Jensen says. “I’m pretty sure it was a whaling captain’s work area. It was not a house.”
A dig at the whaling station commenced, but lasted barely two summers. “There was a very big storm the second year, and it was gone,” She says. “Unfortunately, whatever we are going to know about that place, we already know.”
Source: Anchorage Press