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Placenames History of Afognak Archaeology Afognak Residency Data Collection |
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ANCIENT AFOGNAK Donald W. Clark CONTENTS 1951 Observations by D. Clark
while he was a fisheries stream guard at Litnik. In addition, there have been
Alutiiq Museum-ANC (Afognak Native Corporation) excavations at Malina Creek,
and two projects on Shuyak Island by the State of Alaska. They are outside the
geographic scope of the present report. There also have been minor tests at
other sites. BACKGROUND Before recent introductions,
land mammals were very limited, notably giant brown bears, river otters, and
foxes. They were not of major economic importance compared with sea mammals.
Instead, the land was essentially a platform for living around the ocean, for
maritime hunting, fishing, and gathering. Technically, this lifestyle is referred
to as foraging. The cool, stormy, wet climate – in a word, the Aleutian low pressure system – constrains nature and human activity. Spring comes slowly, and before the recent warm trend, little green vegetation was to be seen until the middle of June. The heads of inlets where salt water is diluted with fresh water freeze, for instance at the mouth of the Afognak River as far out as Lipsett Point. But with their nearly temperate climate, the coasts remain ice-free during winter. Thus, hunting and fishing techniques were not oriented to hunting from sea ice, unlike the case along the Arctic coast of Alaska and Canada. Until less than a millennium ago, possibly just 700 years ago at Afognak Bay, there was no spruce forest to shelter settlements and buffer the impact of storms. Older residents remark on the presence of hillside clearings in the forest within their own time. But there is an upside to rough weather. High winds and wind-enhanced currents actually increase the primary oceanic productivity (of phytoplankton) of the western Gulf of Alaska and thus make a positive contribution towards supporting the abundance of fish, and consequently of sea mammals and of seabirds. The rich oceanic setting includes
fishing banks located east of Afognak Island, sea mammal rookeries and haul
outs, bird rookeries, migratory populations of whales and fur seals and birds,
and a bountiful littoral zone exposed by tides that range by up to 13 feet between
high and low extremes. The complexly embayed and channelled shoreline thus supports
ecological diversity and an abundance of virtually everything from whales to
periwinkles. And there is a lot of shore habitat in relation to land area (3600
km for the Kodiak Archipelago by one measure), again in part due to coastline
complexity. Though there was a certain degree of cultural continuity throughout 7,000 years, this duration was punctuated by numerous developments in technology and houses, and possibly also in organized salmon fishing. The most outstanding and easiest documented development was from flaking tools like knives and spear heads from hard stone to grinding them from sheets of slate. This and other developments lead to the convenient division of prehistory into a series of periods – Ocean Bay, Kachemak, and Koniag – here called traditions. Deglaciation of the islands and adjacent Alaska Peninsula at the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago sets a limit to the possible onset of settlement. As yet, though, no known archaeological remains on either Kodiak Island or Afognak Island come even close to dating back to the time of the glaciers and ice caps. THE PEOPLE THE RUSSIANS MET What kind of people did Shelikhov's
men meet? The answer to this question is, in a sense, the top layer of salt
fish in the deep barrel of prehistory with which this essay deals. These Kodiaks,
Native Americans, Koniags or "Aleuts," now called Alutiiq, lived by,
with, and from the sea. Whalers were important specialists in Alutiiq society,
though somewhat feared because of their medicine or shamanistic power. The whales
floated to the surface and sometimes drifted ashore after they were struck with
poison-tipped spears. The deep bays around Afognak, like Danger Bay and Kizhuyak
Bay, were especially suited for the Alutiiq method of whaling. Also, the whales
were plentiful in Marmot Bay, especially in the tide rips outside Whale Passage,
Afognak Strait, and Shuyak Strait. Hrdlicka reported that a ritual whale trap
was drawn across outer Kizhuyak Bay by traversing the bay towing a pouch of
fat from a corpse. Ordinary hunters focused on harbor seals. Supplemented by
many porpoise and sea lions, they probably supplied most of the red meat and
also oil and hides. The seals were harpooned from kayaks or from the shore after
being attracted within range by a decoy. The decoys consisted of seal head-shaped
helmets and inflated seal skins. Seals also were entangled in large nets and
were clubbed at haulouts, as sea lions probably were, also. Additionally, hunters
managed to take many fleet porpoises with harpoons or nets. Bears were hunted
with bows and arrows, although not many were killed. Occasionally there were
trips across Shelikof Strait to the Alaska Peninsula for caribou. Some meat
and antler probably were obtained by trade with Peninsular Alutiiqs. Sea birds
were taken with multi-pronged spears and in nets. Rookeries were raided for
eggs. In the sea, many fish obligingly
attached themselves to hooked lines, especially cod, rockfish, and halibut.
Of equal importance was the summertime focus on the salmon fishery at the mouths
of streams, especially the Afognak River. Weirs located close to the summer
settlements held back and penned the salmon so they could be speared. The food
quest followed the natural migration cycles of animals and fish. This cycle
formed a calendar for other aspects of Alutiiq life. In the fall, after the
salmon runs had peaked, people returned to their main settlements and hunted
sea mammals as the time for winter festivities approached. The main, or winter,
villages were located close to the outer coasts, so as not to be left isolated
and frozen-in at the heads of bays. Extended families or cooperating households of about 18-20 persons lived in each dwelling. Thus, a settlement of not many houses could hold 100 to 200 persons, though some were larger or smaller. The main or central common room served as a workshop and kitchen, and also for storage, while nuclear or individual families occupied appended anterooms. One of the side chambers was used for a wet "sweat bath" similar in some aspects to the Russian banya (but the rocks were heated in the main room and then taken into the bath chamber). The structures were set into a rectangular pit, dug two feet or deeper into the ground for protection from the weather, banked with turf, and covered with thatch. The superstructure was of driftwood posts and beams; the roof probably was cribbed and had a central smoke hole-skylight. Historical ethnographers and surviving traditions fail to describe the composition of a household. It very likely was an extended family, possibly sisters and their husbands and offspring, plus surviving parents. There also could have been unmarried brothers, foster children, attached persons of low status, and actual slaves. Persons who died were interred within the village area, sometimes even in one of the anterooms of their house, or were taken to an old abandoned village for burial (at their ancestral home?). In a sense, they continued to be members of the community. Important persons might be mummified
and placed in secluded rock shelters where there was a risk of being discovered
by whalers and used in secret rituals. Other rituals and ceremonies
were more public. These are incompletely recorded but included dances, masked
theatrical performances, and feasts during the winter season. At that time,
the recently deceased were honored with a memorial feast. Certain ceremonies
had the objective of pleasing and propagating game, while some were invitational
feasts for trading and socializing with neighboring villages. Important persons included chiefs. They often were "rich men." Their office appears to have been inherited to some degree, from father to son or uncle to nephew, but also was attained or maintained on a personal basis. Shamanism was prominent and was practiced by both men and women, some of whom were transvestites. In addition, there were herbalist curers and other persons with medical expertise. The office of wise-man or kasek, which organized religious ceremonies, was held by yet another specialist later equated to an Orthodox priest. Whalers had a special, but somewhat feared and "unclean," status. Finally, the Alutiiq are widely acknowledged to have owned slaves, but few details are recorded and slavery does not appear to have been essential to Alutiiq economics and society. It certainly would have been useful for chiefs to have slaves to procure and split wood for the sweat bath if it was like the banya of later times. SOME NATURAL HISTORY The relatively high precipitation
(around 80 inches or 200 cm) supplies a large number of streams, which, because
of topography, tend to be short. This results in almost innumerable streams
and "lagoons" where salmon, Dolly Varden char, and steelhead spawn.
Most numerous are the pink salmon and red salmon. The latter ascend the streams
until they reach a lake, but “pinks" and the other species (silver,
chum) do not require lakes to spawn, though some also go there. In late summer,
silver (coho) salmon go into Afognak Lake. Greater numbers of red salmon arrived
as early as the end of April in former years when runs were large. There also
were pinks during the summer. Sliver salmon linger in a necrotic state at the
spawning beds well into winter, but salmon are available primarily during the
late spring and summer months. Most of the interior of Afognak
is hilly and even mountainous, except the east side, and offers few subsistence
resources compared with the sea. Settlements and subsistence activities thus
were oriented towards the sea, though salmon fishing camps sometimes were located
above the mouths of major streams. Afognak River had the largest salmon runs,
though Portage River (Perenosa Bay) and Malina Creek also bear noting. For the
Afognak River, spawning escapement at the weir from 1991 through 1999 has varied
between 66,767 and 131,374 red salmon per year. (The latter figure is an atypically
high aberration prompted by artificial nutrient enhancement or "seeding,"
followed after 1999 by a drastic crash in numbers.) Between 193 and 8604 coho
salmon, and between 8294 and 64,546 pink salmon, also pass through the weir
yearly. Many additional pinks spawned below the weir. If it were possible to
add in the commercial catch of fish headed for this stream, the totals would
be higher. Major environmental changes
affected Afognak in the past. These included partial melting of the Ice Age
(Pleistocene) glaciers that had buried the land and subsequent, brief readvance
of the ice about 11,000 years ago, and then, within a few centuries, final emergence
from the Ice Age. This was followed by colonization by plants and animals culminating
in the arrival of people. There is a time gap, years when the islands simply
lay there before human colonization. Probably the bears got to the island before
people, and most certainly sea mammals did, but little is known about the immediate
postglacial paleontology. This occurred during a time of encroaching seas, before
the relationship between the edge of the land and ocean stabilized roughly 6,000
years ago. (Dates proposed for this event vary widely.) Land-sea relationships
posed a complex scenario of waters rising as global ice caps melted (eustatic
rise), the land rising in turn as it became free of the weight of the ice (isostacy),
as well as further changes in level, up or down, as the earth's plates shifted
and earthquakes rippled through the crust (tectonics). On the whole, except
for the short-term effects of earthquakes, and gradual loss from coastal erosion,
the shore probably has been near its present position for approximately the
last 6,000 years. Earlier edges of the land now are under the ocean because
of the eustatic rise in sea level, but it is not safe to generalize inasmuch
as rising sea level was partially offset by the land mass rebounding after it
was relieved of the weight of the local ice cap. Additionally, the ends of the
Kodiak archipelago have been affected differently by tectonic uplift and depression.
The actual shoreline is constantly being cut back by powerful storm driven seas,
as is readily documented by observations that extend back decades, by Alutiiq
settlements, and by structures, including WWII fortifications, that are tumbling
over the cliffs. All this is in addition to the immediate effects of earthquakes
and subsidence in 1964. There were climatic changes
of a magnitude that would have seriously impacted farmers but may have had little
impact on the maritime hunters of Afognak. Nevertheless, there could have been
significant changes in oceanic currents and temperatures affecting the abundance
and distribution of fish stocks and of sea mammals and birds dependent on fish
for food. These remain to be adequately documented. Analysis of food refuse
from archaeological middens, especially fish bones and the isotopic composition
of clam shells, should provide pertinent, though indirect, information. For
instance, we noted that analysis of lake-bottom deposits by Bruce Finny at the
University of Alaska also is yielding information about fluctuations in red
salmon runs during the last 2,000 years. The size of runs, i.e., the number
of salmon that die in the lakes, affects the composition of gradually accumulating
lake deposits. These deposits can be sampled, analyzed quantitatively for chemical
content, and dated in increments representing the passage of time, in order
to construct a time trend that indirectly represents the abundance of salmon,
notably red salmon. Our rough understanding of climate
is as follows: Soon after the end of the Ice Age, climates warmed rapidly in
the Northern Hemisphere and, for a period, it was even warmer than today. The
first settlers thus may have found Afognak to be a pleasant place. This “Hypsithermal”
warm interval ended about 5,000 years ago with steep, fast cooling, followed
by rapid warming, not quite to the level of the Hypsithermal. Then 3,500 years
ago, the so-called "Neoglacial" began. There were oscillations and
warm spikes in temperature, especially during the Medieval Warm Period about
1,100 years ago. (Note that some researchers deny existence of the Medieval
Warm period outside Europe.) During the Neoglacial period, climate became cooler
and probably wetter, according to the interpretation of pollen recovered from
bogs on Kodiak and Afognak. Perhaps significantly, that is the time when the
Ocean Bay tradition ended, Early Kachemak began, and a Bering Sea people, called
the Arctic Small Tool tradition, appeared on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula,
and even at Kachemak Bay, and possibly visited Afognak Island. Changes in the
distribution of fish stocks could have occurred again, and some mammals peculiar
to the Arctic and Bering Sea regions might have wandered south to Kodiak, but
if that was the case, they did not stay. The Medieval Warm Period is coeval
with the last centuries of the Kachemak tradition, but we do not link it to
the development of the Koniag tradition a few centuries later. Later, early
in the second millennium A.D., spruce trees arrived at the northeast end of
the islands and began their halting march towards the southwest to reach only
recently halfway to the end of Kodiak. The spruce now is filling in meadows
and fields of fireweed left behind in its advance. More recent climatic cooling
during the second half of the second millennium A.D., called the "Little
Ice Age," coincides with the final blooming of precontact Alutiiq culture
and may have been a cause of culture change, according to archaeologist Richard
Knecht. There actually were a number of cooler and warmer periods within the
last millennium, so without specification of particular dates, invoking the
term "Little Ice Age" mainly shows a lack of precise information.
Generally, the size of salmon runs increased during the second millennium A.D.,
although there actually were marked decreases during cold periods, such as was
the case in one of the Little Ice Age episodes late in the millennium. Climate
change undoubtedly affected sea conditions, including possibly the abundance
and distribution of sea mammals upon which the inhabitants of Afognak depended,
but presently little is known of the actual affects of these variables. (Temperature
diagrams can be found in Kopperl 2003 and in various discussions and critiques
of the "hockey stick" climate reconstruction for the past 600 years
widely published in scientific reports and newspaper articles.) There also were short term adverse
effects from earthquakes, tidal waves, and resultant episodes of increased shoreline
erosion. Some villages had to relocate or move back from the edge of the shore.
The net affect of this as far as research into prehistory is involved is that,
along the coast, mostly late-dating sites have survived, although even most
of those were washed away after subsidence in 1964. Littoral zone invertebrates
that had been a source of food were killed off temporarily, whether the land
sank or rose, but they came back after a brief period. It is interesting to speculate
on whether any of Kodiak's limited indigenous land fauna (brown bear, red fox,
vole, river otter, weasel, little brown bat, and ground squirrel) was introduced
by humans. THE THREE ARCHAEOLOGICAL TRADITIONS Three sequential archaeological
traditions or cultures are recognized on Kodiak and Afognak. Kodiak and Afognak
prehistory differ very little. There was some degree of continuity or transition
between traditions. The first tradition, Ocean Bay,
which appeared about 5,500 B.C., is punctuated by technological developments
that stand out both within and beyond the Kodiak region, especially the development
of ground slate implements. Then about 1,900 B.C., the Kachemak tradition developed.
This is a basic old North Pacific culture with strong ties to ancient Eskimo
cultures of the Bering Sea region, and with the Aleutian Islanders, and even
to the Northwest Coast region southward to Vancouver Island. By 1,200 A.D.,
Kachemak had become basically the ancestral culture of the Alutiiq people encountered
by the Russians in 1763. This latter has been called the Koniag tradition. The chronology used here is
based on corrected radiocarbon dates, listed in Appendix III. Radiocarbon dating
is one of archaeology's most powerful tools, but it errs slightly, usually by
understating true age. Appropriate corrections can be applied on the basis of
information derived from comparing tree ring (true) dates with raw radiocarbon
dates. Now, calibrated (corrected) dates are supplied by the laboratory that
does the radiocarbon analysis. This was not the case originally and variations
of dates obtained many years ago often are cited because of differing data used
for correction. Generally, dates of the last 2,000 years fluctuate by a few
decades on either side of real age, but before then they gradually fall short.
By 4,000 years ago, the shortfall has increased to about 350 years; 5,000 years
ago it is about 600 years (i.e., a radiocarbon date of 4,400 years actually
means the age is 5,000 years). Radiocarbon dates should be interpreted with
a degree of latitude because laboratory methods entail statistical imprecision
(the + "error"). Additionally, the date may be indirect. For instance,
it is assumed that the age of driftwood burned in a hearth is close the date
when the fire was lit, but that might not be the case because the driftwood
may have been drifting and lying around some time. Both the artifacts and the nonmaterial
culture of these traditions can be thought of in terms of functional groups,
particularly (a) hunting and fishing, including boats and weapons; (b) tools
including tools to make things or process materials; (c) household items such
as lamps and pottery; (d) clothing and personal adornment; (e) ceremonial, ritual,
and games; and also (f) architecture, meaning houses and other structures. In
some cases, they can also be indicators of gender, occupational specialization,
and of social distinction or ranking. In numbers, the tool category predominates,
but the most common tools like hammer stones, abraders, and cobble spall (boulder
flake) scrapers and knives are not very distinguished. They are essentially
natural utilized stones. Artifacts usually were made
of local materials, although some items were imported from the mainland, including
certain furs, tusk-shaped dentalium shells, ivory, marble, amber, and jet (coal)
used for ornaments and carvings, caribou antler, beaver and porcupine teeth
for implement bits, possibly red ochre for rituals, and some food, especially
caribou venison. Most of these were low-bulk items that traders could easily
transport. Metal, mainly copper, was imported through middlemen at Cook Inlet.
Its ultimate source was the Copper River, and possibly also Prince William Sound.
Copper usually is late in time, less than 1,000 years old, possibly because
the tribes living in the source areas did not realize how useful the metal could
be and they had not developed trade in this metal. The extent to which iron
was used is problematical. Small pieces of iron, used for tool bits, had been
imported into northwest Alaska from Siberia fully a millennium before European
contact. On Kodiak, evidence for iron prior to European contact is limited to
apparent rust stains on artifacts that might have held iron blades or bits.
When these materials are found, they show that there was trade by wealthy persons
who could afford prestige items. The island was self-sufficient in resources,
and it was primarily luxury goods that were imported. Locally-produced pottery partially
replaced bentwood tubs or other containers for preparing food on southern Kodiak
during the last 1,000 years, but it was not adopted on Afognak Island. Undoubtedly,
though, Afognak Islanders knew about pottery, as it was briefly used a short
distance across Marmot Bay at Anton Larsen Bay about 1,100 A.D., and several
years ago a potsherd (fragment) was found at Malina Beach on the Shelikof Strait
side of the island. Afognak Islanders would have seen pottery on the Alaska
Peninsula as well when they went across Shelikof Strait to hunt caribou and
trade. Finally, they might have married girls from southwestern Kodiak whose
mothers made pottery. Area differences as seen, for instance, in the distribution
of ceramics, show that the Kodiak archipelago was not inhabited by a single
homogeneous tribe. Probably, some of the customs, games, songs, stories, rituals,
and style fashions (ideational culture) that complemented technology first appeared
among neighboring groups and then were adopted by ancestral Alutiit. Numerous
region-wide features were held in common, and a shared language helped maintain
a distinct Pacific Eskimo or Alutiiq culture area that persisted for several
millennia, although differences at the sub-dialect level reminded people that
theirs was a diverse area. The distinctive character of
each of the three traditions of the past depends very much on styles of hunting
implements and of a certain other artifacts. There also were differences in
house construction and, evidently, in level of salmon utilization. Examples
are the distinctively styled boat-shaped early Ocean Bay lamps, Kachemak stone
lamps with animal sculptures, heavy grooved Koniag splitting adzes, and, at
the micro level, attributes of Kachemak and Koniag labrets. Bentwood containers, basketry,
kayak and umiak parts, weapon shafts, labrets, figurines and dolls, masks and
other ceremonial gear, and game pieces are prominent at waterlogged sites where
wood, cordage, and baskets have been preserved. The only waterlogged site intensively
investigated thus far is a Koniag site at Karluk, and we can only surmise that
similar items were present in earlier cultures before Koniag times, but have
disappeared. There also has been very limited recovery of wooden artifacts from
Late Kachemak sites. Waterlogged sites occur when ground water to rises into
the site deposits, as happens at the base of a hill: the water excludes air,
and this slows the decay of wood. The terms used for arms and
weapons–spears, lances, bayonets, darts, harpoons, leisters and arrows–can
be confusing. A spear freely leaves the hand, i.e., it is thrown, and it does
not have a line attached to it. The hand-held fish-spear or trident is the exception.
If the spear has a feathered (fletched) shaft, it may be called a dart. Some
darts are only slightly larger than arrows, but whales were killed with six-foot-long
darts! An implement that is held and jabbed is a lance. Lances tend to be larger
and heavier than spears. With a harpoon, a connection is maintained with the
quarry by means of a line attached at one end to the harpoon head and, at the
other end, to a float or to the projectile shaft, or held in the hunter's hand.
Harpoons can be cast like spears, as in the case of harpoon-darts, thrust like
a lance, or, shot from a bow, as in the case of harpoon-arrows used for hunting
sea otters. Leisters are spears, darts and arrows with multiple prongs or tips
arranged around the end or at a midway location on the shaft, used on birds
and fish. Bayonet simply is a descriptive term for a long lance blade or spear
head. In the description of each tradition, attention will be given to housing. Houses, together with clothing, protected a person from the environment. The house also placed a person in a family context. Household organization helped a person articulate with the rest of the community and may have organized the activities of junior members, the families of daughters for instance. (Newly married Alutiiq men usually went to live with their wives.) Houses are the supreme artifact. Today, realizing the importance of houses and their attributes for historical reconstruction and social analysis, field archaeologists investigating Kodiak prehistory are focusing on houses. This was not always the case as excavation techniques, such as digging a trench through a site, were not oriented towards uncovering whole houses. And some archaeologists, like Ales Hrdlicka who dug at Larsen Bay, were in too much of a hurry to take the pain to properly uncover and record houses. The size and layout of houses reflect the organization of households. Construction of large houses, like those found in Koniag tradition villages, implies planning, a household leader, and probably also wealth in order to assemble the necessary materials and secure labor to help build a dwelling. Earlier houses were smaller, easily constructed, and probably were the abode of nuclear families. It is instructive, too, to compare the features of housing in permanent villages with those of summer villages or fishing camps. Data for this comparison, suggest that houses were similar at both types of settlements, but sometimes were smaller and were more lightly built at the summer fishing camps. Houses also contain features that give clues about cooking techniques and storage. Knowledge of precontact Alutiiq housing on Afognak is derived primarily from the Koniag tradition village site at Settlement Point, supplemented by observations of surface outlines that have survived from old house pits. For the Kachemak tradition, three houses have been excavated, or partially excavated on Afognak, but more Kachemak houses have been investigated on Kodiak Island. Because of their age most early Kachemak house pits are much muted, or are obscured by overlaying Koniag refuse layers. The same observation applies to the Ocean Bay tradition. For the Ocean Bay tradition, only parts of houses have been excavated at Litnik, but others have been excavated by the Alutiiq Museum elsewhere on Kodiak Island. OCEAN BAY (EARLY AND LATE--OR STAGES
I AND II-- 5,500 B.C..TO 1,900 B.C.) The highly successful Ocean
Bay hunters managed for several thousand years with a single type of non-toggling
harpoon head, made in a range of sizes—– “if it works, don't
fiddle with it” seems to have been their axiom. There also were spears
in several varieties, including ones for birds and fish, some with flaked stone
tips, and some with bone heads. It is not known if they had the bow and arrow,
which is believed to be absent in North America at this time, but early Ocean
Bay used very tiny flaked stone points, which might have been used to tip arrows. Early Ocean Bay had microblades
set in slots along the sides of slender unbarbed bone spear points, a technological
trait handed down from much earlier antecedents. A microblade is a thin, very
regular, narrow (quarter inch or less) elongate flake with straight razor-sharp
edges produced by controlled kapping techniques from specially prepared small
blocks or cores of stone. Microblades formed ready-to-use cutting edges for
small tools, and points. Those found on Kodiak and Afognak are 5,500 years old
and older; then they were replaced with flaked stone points. It is not known
what kind of game these points were used on, but they likely were used on sea
mammals. Otherwise, they would have been for defense and aggression against
other people, and possibly bears. Archaeologists like to point out that with
microblades it is possible to produce a considerable length of tool cutting
edge from a single block of stone. This is advantageous where it is difficult
to obtain desired raw material, especially during the frozen winter, and a long
term supply must be carried from place to place. But this consideration definitely
does not apply to southern coastal Alaska. Traditional usage, rather than material
economy, may be the reason why Ocean Bay people used microblades. There is evidence
for the early use of spear throwers (atlatls) from throwing board pegs recovered
by P. Hausler from the Rice Ridge site located near Chiniak. Later, in Kachemak
times, toggle harpoon heads and additional styles of non-toggling heads appeared.
Part of the necessary equipment
for hunting at sea was a waterproof parka (kamleika). No garments have been
recovered from archaeological digs in the Pacific Coastal area, but numerous
delicate eyed needles that would have served for sewing water repellent gear
were recovered at the Rice Ridge. Other Ocean Bay implements included stone
lamps; adze blades; fish hooks; cobble spalls which were used as knives, probably
to split salmon; scrapers for hides and also for sawing slate to make tools;
and the occasional large grooved cobble, probably used for sinking a fishing
line to the floor of the ocean. At the “Slate” site at the Afognak
River mouth, 44% of boulder flakes had a smoothed edge from use in sawing slate,
21% had a natural more or less sharp edge because they were knives or rejects,
and the remainder had been shaped into choppers or toothed objects. The earliest
lamps were long, narrow, and pointed at one end and squared-off at the other
end, and had deep bowls. They are so distinctive and unique to that culture
that even incomplete lamps can be attributed to Ocean Bay at a glance. Very
early in Ocean Bay, large parallel-sided flakes, almost shaped like a prisms,
termed “blades,” were used as blanks for the production of stone
tools. Blade technology was a carryover from the earlier Paleo-Arctic era on
mainland Alaska and Siberia, as also were the slotted bone points armed with
inset microblades. The adze blades also are distinctive to Ocean Bay. Usually,
they were flaked to shape over both surfaces—top and bottom—and
at the working end are shaped slightly like a gouge: slightly convex at the
top and slightly concave on the underside. Grinding to sharpen the bit is limited
to the convex (top) surface. On Afognak, Early Ocean Bay
remains were recovered from the so-called Chert site, originally designated
Afo-109 (now Afg-011). This site is an eroded remnant on the tidal reach of
the Afognak River. Little of substance remained there when the site was excavated
in 1971; only thin traces away from the shore remain today. Late Ocean Bay,
described below, was found in the upper layers of the same site, farther up
the river estuary in the basal part of site Afg-088 excavated in 2004, and across
the river at the so-called Slate site, originally designated Afo-106 (now Afg-008),
also excavated in 1971. None of these sites has any preserved bone or other
organic artifacts. About 6,000 or 6,500 years ago, these
people adapted the bone working techniques of sawing, scraping, and grinding
to fashioning slate. Thenceforth, ground slate tools partially replaced flaked
flint (chert) tools and later, in Ocean Bay II (Late Ocean Bay) times, slate
grinding became the main mode of working stone. This handy technique became
popular and spread down the coast to the vicinity of Sitka and beyond into British
Columbia. Mainly pointed implements, probably weapons, were produced in slate.
Most of them followed the elongate tapered outline of sawn slate strips or blanks,
but some were copies of smaller flaked chert tools. Some of the long stemmed
points and blades are truly like bayonets. They have no known prototypes, but
it is suspected that the large slate weapons and tools incorporate the attributes
of what formerly had been a flaked chert blade or tip, plus its bone or wooden
haft. Many ground slate blades bear fine edge serrations or tiny barbs along
the blade and stem and cut-line decorations on the faces. It is not clear that
the cut lines were purely non-functional. They could they have held poison or
have facilitated bleeding. A change of this magnitude often would be heralded
a new culture tradition, but in the present case the adoption of slate technology
was clearly generated within the Ocean Bay culture, it was an added feature.
It did signal a kind of watershed in prehistory inasmuch as thereafter the characteristic
technogy of the area was slate grinding. The broad, sometimes crescentic
knife, commonly known by the Eskimo term "ulu," was absent until the
end of Ocean Bay times. Cutting and butchering was done with double-edged blades
shaped somewhat like large lance blades or daggers. Some experimental archaeologists
have found that it is very difficult to cut through salmon skin with slate ulu-type
knives. The same would apply to tough animal hides and whale skin. They did
find, though, that sharp cobble spalls could be used to split salmon. We noted
that there was an appreciable number of natural cobble spalls in the Ocean Bay
II site at the mouth of the Afognak River. Such spalls or boulder flakes continued
to be abundant in succeeding Kachemak tradition sites at the mouth of the river.
The earliest ground slate tools were mainly pointed knives and spears. Perhaps
pointing rendered these implements better for cutting into hides and salmon
skins than the broad ulu-type knife. It was necessary to split the fish if they
were to be dried, but not necessary if they were to be eaten fresh or cured
in a pit as “stink fish.” The fact remains, however, that ground
slate ulu blades are especially abundant at apparent salmon fishing camps and
the premise that salmon skin cannot be cut with slate knives needs further examination.
One of the best expressions
of Late Ocean Bay, though without any preserved bone, is found at the mouth
of the Afognak River at the so-called “Slate” site. People must
have stayed at his location to catch and process salmon, but the site also was
a tool factory. With free time between salmon runs and a good local source of
slate, people took the opportunity the make large numbers of sawn slate tool
blanks, as well as finished ground knives and lance or spear points. The number
of tools and blanks produced was far in excess of immediate needs. The surplus
undoubtedly was intended for use elsewhere during the year and for trade to
other communities who did not have access to good slate. Chert flaking had almost
died out as a manufacturing technique at this locality, but was revived to some
extent later, and it continued thus during Kachemak times. There are two radiocarbon
dates for this site. Similar finished and partially finished slate artefacts
are found across the river, but there is much less early stage manufacturing
debris. For the best definition of Ocean
Bay, it is necessary to look to a site on Kodiak, Rice Ridge located near Cape
Chiniak, where there has survived bone artifacts and bones from the game and
fish caught. At the Afognak River sites, only stone has survived. Robert Kopperel
has identified the faunal remains from the Rice Ridge site. Most remains probably
are food refuse, though some may be from animals taken for their fur and hides
(but if the flesh was not used, the bones should not be in the site deposit
along with food refuse). All the animals found in later sites (see below) are
found there. In addition, there are uncommon marmot remains, including mandibles
on which the incisor tooth is sharpened for use as a carving bit. Sea otter
bones are unusually common, much more so than later, and often in deteriorating
condition. They may have been cooked. Brown bear are well represented, though
not abundant. There was a large suite of bird bones, also fish bones and shellfish
remains. Excavations have partially uncovered
Ocean Bay houses. Rice Ridge seems to have had rectangular floors up to 12 by
18 feet in extent. There are numerous floors, but they are superimposed in a
small topographically delimited area, which suggests that houses were rebuilt
more or less in place atop one another. Family continuity is suggested. There
was a succession of rectangular stone slab hearths, except near the bottom where
the second-oldest hearth was enclosed in a ring of cobbles, and, below that,
the oldest hearth was simply a place where there had been fires. Late Ocean
Bay deposits there also revealed a dug-in or semisubterranean circular house
12 feet in diameter. A relatively small subrectangular depression within the
historic Litnik fish camp appears to be an Ocean Bay house judging from the
presence of a deep red ochre streak, probably the house floor. This feature
shows that dug-in houses, often thought to have been for the snug winter mode
of living, may even have been built for summer use. Evidence for substantial housing
also comes from the Slate site, AFG 011, at the Afognak River, though the details
are fragmentary. Here, boulders had been used in construction. Numerous irregular
stone blocks of various sizes occurred in swath 18 feet wide. These probably
are from a tumbled house or two, the front edge(s) of which was lost to bank
erosion. Tumbled and disturbed house ruins would be difficult to interpret even
when entire, and are almost impossible to understand when part of the structure
is missing. Two stone lamps were localized next to three post holes in one area
of this house feature. Some of the stones lay more or less atop others but not
as a solid, coursed wall. An orange-brown volcanic ash that underlay the occupation
had been removed down to glacial till from about half of this feature, probably
for a house pit or to level the floor of a house situated on sloping ground.
Boulders also were used to construct
an Ocean Bay II shelter at the Blisky site on Near Island. There, disarranged
stones roughly describe two ovals, each about 8 feet wide and 13 feet long.
Within each oval, there is a hearth surrounded by rocks. Some of the rocks were
piled four high, which suggests walls. The top of the shelter could have been
made of skins supported by arched poles. Many volcanic ashes fell after
the glaciers melted and the islands came out of the Ice Age. Intense volcanic
activity on the adjacent mainland lasted (no volcanoes on Kodiak) until about
six-thousand years ago, forming the thick brown, orange, and yellow bands sometimes
referred to as "butter-clay." In time, the ash has been altered to
clay. When it is wet, the butter-clay is very plastic and slippery. Early Ocean
Bay settlements often lay directly atop, and even within the butter-clay deposit,
which frequently provides an imprint of post holes and ancient house pits. The
butter-clay is a composite of several volcanic ash falls. More ash or "tephras"
also fell later, but with centuries between major ash falls. Thus, volcanic
ash layers found higher up in the deposits can be used to help date and correlate
sites. Finally, the highest layer, the Katmai-Novarupta ash of 1912 that smothers
all Afognak sites, can be credited with protecting site surfaces from disturbances.
On low-lying sites, there also is a reminder of the 1964 tidal waves: a secondary
deposit of Katmai ash and sand stirred up from the head of Afognak Bay by the
tsunami. The mouth of the Afognak River was a major settling basin. There the
secondary deposits that settled out of the water are almost as thick as the
primary tephra of 1912, from which they are separated by a very thin band of
soil that formed during the 1912-1964 interval. KACHEMAK TRADITION, 1,900 B.C. to
1,200 A.D. Late Kachemak was more elaborate,
with much attention having been given to ritual treatment of the dead with many
aspects; to personal ornamentation, with a profusion of labrets, beads and pendants;
and an oil lamp art that probably expressed male and female deities. Compared
with Ocean Bay, there were many changes in fishing and hunting artifacts. This
does not necessarily mean that there was less fishing earlier: there are alternative
ways to catch fish, especially salmon. Some tools in the Kachemak kit
continued to be flaked from chert (flint) which had been the dominate tool making
mode of early Ocean Bay times. Little-modified stone slabs, bars, cobbles, and
small boulders also were used extensively for whetstones, fish line and net
weights, for very large hide scrapers, as material for stone lamps, cobble spall
tools, mauls, ochre grinders, and for weights grooved and attached to a line.
Cobble spalls (boulder flakes) often were shaped to make scrapers and choppers
and also were used for saws. Sometimes slate broke with a very sharp highly
angled (acute) edge that did not need further modification to make a slate slab
ready for use as a knife. In a sense, the stony shore was the Early Kachemak
hardware store. Early Kachemak made much greater
use of grooved cobble and notched pebble weights than did Ocean Bay, probably
indicating changes in fishing techniques or emphasis. Although cobbles and pebbles
could be attached to lines and nets without having to be notched or grooved,
Kachemak people and their Koniag successors did make great numbers of them,
nonetheless. So we see some significance in their absence, wherever and whenever
that occurs. One peculiarity still to be explained is that notched pebble weights,
probably net sinkers, became smaller through time. At Early Kachemak sites as
at AFG-088 at the mouth of the Afognak River, the notched shingles were very
large, 10 cm long and longer, thus weighing several times as much as ones half
as large found at Late Kachemak fishing sites. We do not think this was an adaptation
to the river current, as smaller weights were used nearby at Late Kachemak localities.
One style of grooved stone,
found at coastal sites but rarely on the rivers, was grooved near one end, leaving
a knob. It is difficult to see how a line could be attached to one of these
plummets. This type became popular to the westward, on the Aleutian Islands,
and at Kachemak Bay, too. Everywhere it belongs to the Early Kachemak and the
Paleo-Aleut cultures of 3,500 years ago. Then it went out of style. Labrets, lip and cheek plugs,
were now adopted, though hardly any have been recovered from sites on Afognak
predating Late Kachemak. (They probably await discovery there; they were worn
early not far away at Kachemak Bay and on the Shelikof Strait side of the Alaska
Peninsula from Early Kachemak times onward.) The custom of wearing labrets may
have reached Kodiak from Southeast Alaska and British Columbia, a region commonly
referred to as the Northwest Coast, or from Siberia, where they had appeared
earlier. Labrets have attracted some attention because they occur in many styles
or variations, which may have indicated the wearer’s social or kin-group
affiliation. Additionally, the use sometimes of exotic materials for labrets
shows that they could have sent a signal of the wearer’s wealth and social
status. The broad, straight to highly
curved, back-hafted, single-edged knife or ulu, a hallmark of Eskimos, became
common, though hardly so in the earliest years of the tradition. This finding
from the Old Kiavak site on Kodiak in the 1960s was confirmed by work at Afg-088
in 2004. On Afognak, all recognized ulus are sheets of ground slate; such blades
are not present in the flaked chert industry. Almost all those from Afg-088
are from the top of the site deposit and probably date to about 2,800 years
ago or less, about 1,000 years after the inception of the Early Kachemak phase.
But quite a number found washed out onto the shore of the river show traces
of the Ocean Bay mode of shaping through scraping, which suggests that they
may also have been made in earlier transitional Ocean Bay-Kachemak times. Another
time-sensitive trait is the use of drilled holes to assist hafting ulu blades
and double-edged flensing knives. None was found at Afg-088, though the sample
is reasonably large when fragments and the beach collection are counted. Drilled
holes appear at a moderate frequency during Late Kachemak times and during the
Koniag tradition. By the latter date, after 1,200 A.D., there also were pecked
and sawn holes which provides a further guide for dating undocumented collections.
Kachemak rapidly lost its
Ocean Bay features, but it continued in a somewhat impoverished mode until about
200 B.C., when elements of art, ceremony, and decoration became commonplace.
Art is a defining feature of Late Kachemak. Better preservation of bone is also
a factor in providing a less impoverished developing picture of Late Kachemak.
Data come from several excavated sites on Kodiak, from the 1999 and 2000 text
excavation at the Afognak Aleut Town site, excavation of the Tsunami house in
2001, and excavation at the Salmon Bend site at Litnik in 2002. A fine Late
Kachemak collection also has come from the Crag Point site located across Marmot
Bay at the entrance to Anton Larsen Bay. Stone specimens also have been found
along the eroded edges of Late Kachemak sites at the Afognak River. Tools now include an array of
bone implements: awls, delicate eyed needles, whale bone wedges, harpoon heads
and sockets placed at the end of the harpoon shaft, arrow heads and spear prongs,
pins for fish gorges and composite implements, fish hook shank and barbed parts
(the two were lashed together to form the complete hook), fish effigy lures,
and sockets for stone adze bits. Most of these items had been known 2,000 years
earlier in Ocean Bay times, so possibly their absence from Early Kachemak is
due only to poor preservation and inadequate exploration. Barbed harpoon heads
were very numerous at Aleut Town and reflect an emphasis on sea mammal hunting.
Stone adze bits usually are
small and not numerous compared with their abundance in Koniag times, possibly
indicating that there was little heavy woodworking. Whetstones and abraders
in various shapes, sizes, and materials served for smoothing wood, for finishing
and edging slate knives and projectile points, and for edging adze bits. Tablets
of stone with smooth flat edges may have been burnishers for embossing and smoothing
wood. Complementing adzes for working wood were bone wedges. They were recovered
in great numbers at the Aleut Town site, the 135 specimens being noteworthy
for the very small scale of the excavation. Clamshell-shaped spalls from cobbles
made expedient tools for scraping and other uses, such as sawing bone and stone.
Tablets of gritty stone also were used as saws. Ornaments, mostly for human
adornment became commonplace. These included both stylized and naturalistic
human and animal figurines, doll parts, miniature harpoons, large hair or clothing
pins, combs, "buckles," bear tooth trophies, cylindrical and sometimes
globular and pendant-shaped beads in jet (a form of coal), amber, a red stone
from Kachemak Bay, shell, ivory and other material, rings for the nasal septum
or ear lobe, nose pins, and especially labrets. Labrets were made in several
styles, sizes and materials but jet was desired. Wood labrets were most common
in the succeeding Koniag tradition, and the case for Kachemak, for which surviving
wood is uncommon, may have been the same. Wood labrets likely were for everyday
wearing to avoid the weight of stone, to be replaced by ivory and jet when the
occasion warranted. Jet also is lightweight, which may be one of the reasons
for its popularity. A small number of slate pebbles (four) with incised designs appear to be somewhat like incised pebbles of comparable age found at Prince William Sound, and likely are precursors of the incised figurines that were to be made in great numbers during the Koniag tradition. From the circumstance of their
location, it is likely that the sites at the mouth of the Afognak River were
fishing stations. The locality later was called Litnik, the Russian term for
“summer place,” i.e. fishing camp. At the Early Kachemak site, Afg-088,
there were mainly notched net sinkers, also many ulu knife blades. This fits
identification of the site as a fishing station, but the case for the two Late
Kachemak houses is not that clear—their artifacts are not greatly different
than those from coastal sea mammal hunting communities, except that notched
pebble net sinkers are common. At Aleut Town, there were no net sinkers. The evidence from Kodiak and
Kachemak Bay shows that the dead usually were interred within occupied settlements,
keeping the deceased as members of the community. Kachemak burials have not
been reported at Afognak, although scattered human bones were common at the
Aleut Town site. Incomplete burials and scattered human bones are startlingly
abundant in both Early and Late Kachemak refuse deposits (but not at Afognak
River, where bone has not survived). One chopped femoral fragment from Aleut
Town looks like a butcher job. The human bones often show cut marks and breaks,
or have been made into artifacts. Some from Crag Point, across Marmot Bay from
Afognak, and the Uyak site were drilled for attachment or suspension in some
kind of marionette. At Aleut Town, sections of jaw
with two and three teeth had been cut out of the skull and ground to an even
surface across the front of the teeth, perhaps for inlaying some macabre artifact.
They and all the scattered bones from that site were reburied there. These occurrences
have generated considerable discussion of a Kachemak mortuary complex in the
region comprising Kodiak Island and Kachemak Bay, and also of possible cannibalism.
The various investigations on the Kodiak Archipelago and at Kachemak Bay have
revealed a group of practices that would fit into such a mortuary complex. There
are both flexed single burials, which are the norm, and mass graves. There are
also secondary burials (reburials) of a bagged or boxed skeleton. Extended burial
was rare. Mass burials were interpreted by Hrdlicka as evidence of massacres,
but that is not necessarily the case. One grave at the Uyak site (Larsen Bay)
contained parts of 18-20 individuals described by Robert Heizer as “skeletons
piled indiscriminately; skeletons incomplete. Probably secondary reburial. Long
bones split (for marrow?)” (Heizer 1956 "Archaeology of the Uyak
Site"). A smaller, more or less similar human bone assemblage was found
across from Afognak at Crag Point ( ). Current thought is that the mass graves
are mortuary crypts that were reopened from time to time to add more bodies
(sometimes disturbing earlier burials in the process), to add the stray human
bones encountered during house construction, and possibly "rehabilitated"
war trophies and remains utilized for rituals that no longer were wanted. Other
mortuarial elements include burial with foxes (now skeletons) and an eagle,
artificial eyes placed in the skull, extra skulls or trophies in the grave,
and, at Kachemak Bay, a clay mask modeled to the skull as well as bones with
drilled holes for suspension or assembly. Cut marks on some bones may be from
ritual dismemberment, perhaps to render an enemy harmless, (Such “joint
cutting,” a very widespread practice, in Alaska is documented in Athapaskan
Indian lore.) Cremations have been found, but they are rare and may even be
unintentional. Altogether, Kachemak treatment of the dead and use of human remains
was varied, extensive, and decidedly bizarre. Later, Koniag burial customs,
like Kachemak, also emphasized interment in occupied and abandoned sites or
house pits, although cairn burial and disposition in rock crevices also was
practiced. (Ocean Bay burial practices are unknown.) Parts of corpses, and even
whole bodies, were stolen by whalers and used variously, but this probably involved
only a small number of deceased. Most early Kachemak lamps are small, plain oval, and little modified from the large beach cobbles from which they were made by pecking out a shallow basin. They would have been used mainly for light, not as cooking stoves, as was the case in the Arctic and sometimes in the antecedent Ocean Bay culture. In Late Kachemak times, stone lamps became very elaborate (decorated) and large—up to 90 pounds in the case of a “breasted” lamp reportedly found Malina Creek about 60 years ago, later sold by Paul Herring to the National Museum of Denmark. There also were miniature lamps as little as two inches long. Some lamps obviously incorporate elements for participation in rituals, judging from carvings of whales, seals, bears, humans, faces with hands, human breasts, and presumed magic circles in the bowl or on the lamp exterior. Some, as found at Litnik, had a prow (as on a boat) at the exterior fore part. The area of lamp art includes the Alaska Peninsula adjacent to Kodiak, Kodiak Archipelago, Cook Inlet, and Prince William Sound. This is the distribution of Kachemak culture. The lamps or lamp deities may have been the focus of a ritual at Kachemak Bay, also on Afognak. In addition to female lamps, with breasts, there appear to be male lamps. Male lamps are identified at
Kachemak Bay by Sphinx-like figures with outstretched hands in the bowl, but
on Kodiak there are only human faces or heads in low relief and figures of undetermined
gender in the bowl and on the exterior. From the Uyak site, there is a lamp
with a platform in the bowl. We speculate that a carving of a deity was placed
on the platform facing the flickering flame. A version of the lamp and household
deity in which the deity figure was suspended on a cord above and slightly behind
the lamp was found in northwest Alaska. At Kachemak Bay, large lamps of both
genders were intentionally defaced, battered, and broken apart. These large
lamps required a major input of labor and artistic skill for their execution.
Their destruction thus must indicate no small level of distress and dissatisfaction
with the lamp deities. This facet of Late Kachemak culture appears to have been
absent from the Kodiak Archipelago. Exotic goods were obtained through
trade. Two Late Kachemak houses excavated by Amy Steffian at the Uyak site,
Larsen Bay, appear to have been home workshops for producing jet (coal) ornaments,
particularly labrets. Such concrete evidence for craft specialization is rare
in Alaskan archaeology, though it is documented in studies of historic cultures.
The raw material probably came from the mainland. Many elements of Kachemak
technology, as well as tool and projectile point styles and ornaments, are identical
to those of the 2,000-year-old ancestral Eskimo Norton culture of the Bering
Sea region, including the Naknek drainage of the Alaska Peninsula. Norton and
Kachemak people probably visited across the Alaska Peninsula for trade and held
“invitational feasts.” They also may have intermarried. Ancient Afognak was part of
the broader community of ancestral Yupik Eskimo peoples. Ivory was among the
material traded. Large ivory objects have been found on Afognak (in private
collections) and at Karluk (in Alutiiq Museum). We have noted the cache of 20
Norton-style arrow tips found at the Salmon Bend site. They were made off the
island and brought to Afognak. A distinctive red stone used for beads and nose-rings
was popular in villages around Marmot Bay. It is thought to have come from Kachemak
Bay. Beaver incisors which also came from the mainland were favored by both
Kachemak and Koniag people for carving tool bits. Antler also was imported.
There may have been caribou hunting forays to the Alaska Peninsula, but caribou
bones are very rare among the faunal refuse in the middens. Nevertheless, tools
made of caribou antler are common at some sites, such as the Uyak site at Larsen
Bay. There is little information
on Early Kachemak houses that is both complete and reliable. Most of them probably
did not differ greatly from single-room Late Kachemak houses. At the Old Kiavak
site, located southwest of Old Harbor, a trench intersected a 23-foot-long house
pit; and a 28-foot-long cluster of hearths, post holes, and floor layers that
may have been part of one structure. These dimensions are considerably greater
than the size of better-defined Kachemak tradition houses. Three possible Early
Kachemak houses uncovered during Hrdlicka's Uyak Site excavations, as reported
by Heizer, were single rectangular rooms, slightly dug into the ground, measuring
from about 8 feet square up to 13 by 16.5 feet. In each, there was a stone slab
fireplace. Excavations at the Bliski site on Near Island by the Alutiiq Museum
uncovered part of a floor dated to about 3,000 years ago. The complete structure
possibly was subrectangular and may have measured about 18 feet across. It is
identified as a semisubterranean house, dug into the ground almost a foot and
a half, and probably covered with sod or thatch. Early Kachemak houses have
not been investigated at Afognak Bay. The best data for Late Kachemak
houses are from the Uyak site near Larsen Bay. Heizer reported small single-room
rectangular houses, plus a circular one about 28 feet in diameter. Steffian's
houses, from new excavations at the Uyak site (published in Anthropological
Papers of the University of Alaska), show entry passages half to fully the length
of the rest of the house, which was rectangular with a central stone slab hearth.
The single rooms tend to be 13 feet square and have floor-level entrance passages.
Most of a very late house of similar format was uncovered by the excavations
at the Aleut Town site. At the Afognak River Tsunami
site there was a single-room subrectangular house shown in Figures and . It
was at the maximum 6 meters long and 4 meters (13 feet) wide. Unlike the Uyak
site houses, it may have been without an entryway passage. However, an entry
could have been present inasmuch as part of one end of the house was clipped
off by another dug-in house. The house site was complicated by reoccupation
after the tidal wave and the construction of an additional house off to one
side. Four piles of stone blocks were found at the four corners of the Tsunami
House. Two corners also had posts, two among the 14 posts that held up the superstructure.
Roof beams probably extended from stone pile to stone pile or from corner post
to corner post. These were not very high, and it probably was not possible for
a person to stand up close to the wall. The roof then would have been built
up to a greater height by cribbing successive tiers of beams. The top of any
vertical wall planks would have been leaned against the lower, outer beams like
in the construction of a barabara (Siberian Native term for semisubterranean
structure widely used in southwestern Alaska; the Alutiiq term is ciqlluaq.).
With a cribbed roof, unwanted projections and roots, such as would be on driftwood
trees, could be left to stick up and to overhang the outer walls of the structure.
This greatly simplified preparation of timber which would have been a laborious
task using stone adzes. There were at least ten clay-lined
pits in the floor of the Tsunami House. There had been more, but probably not
all pits were in use simultaneously. The pits took up so much floor space that
it would have been difficult to move about within the house unless there were
plank covers. Excavation also revealed at least two earlier filled-in pits.
Only at one was there a void air space covered with a large slate slab; others
were loosely filled with soil similar to the site matrix. The pit lining was
tan and yellow-brown butter clay derived from volcanic ash. This is unlike the
case at the nearby Settlement Point and Aleut Town sites, where large pits were
lined with blue-gray glacial till clay. The pits probably were used for storage,
for food in particular, but no telling traces of their contents were recognized.
One of the better-defined pits was 46 cm in diameter inside and 60 cm at the
top (outside) after the clay lining was removed. It was 43 cm deep. One other
pit was larger; none was deeper. For comparison, the clay-lined pits at the
Uyak site excavated by Hrdlicka were up to 72 cm in diameter, but only 20 to
30 cm deep. Their height may have been reduced through damage after abandonment.
This is considerably smaller than the large Koniag clay-lined pits found at
Settlement Point. There was no charcoal, gravel, or fire- cracked rock fill
to suggest that the Late Kachemak pits had been used for cooking. There was
also a clay apron around one of the hearths at the very late Kachemak Aleut
Town site. Such aprons also have been found elsewhere. Though the uses to which
these pits were put it not clear, they obviously relate to food preparation
and storage. The pits evidently relied on the ability of clay to keep water
in or air out. Curing of fish and meat under anaerobic (airless) conditions
comes to mind as a possible use, otherwise wooden boxes and baskets would have
sufficed. There were numerous stone slabs
on the floor. One covered a pit; others formed a shallow crypt that had slabs
for both its floor and cover, as well as for the low sides; and one sloping
group of slabs formed a localized pavement. Most slabs were on, or immediately
above, the actual yellow-orange clay floor of the house, thus they were part
of the initial construction or date soon thereafter. The reason for the slabs
was not apparent. However, one day after much of the clay tephra (yellow-brown)
floor layer had been exposed, we attempted to work while it was raining. The
spectacle of four people slipping and sliding in a pit was riotously akin to
some modern TV stunts. Obviously, the floor had to be kept powder dry or covered
with some kind of flooring—grass and slabs. Afognak data also include a
Kachemak dugout house at the Salmon Bend site at Litnik, described next, and
two houses farther out on the bay at Aleut Town. They show that Kachemak people
built relatively permanent houses, even at their probable summer settlements. The Salmon Bend house, located
across the river from the Tsunami house, is unlike any other Late Kachemak house
excavated thus far in the Kodiak archipelago. Its uniqueness lies in the fact
that it consists of two rooms, not just one. Because of a lack of trained help,
it could not be completely excavated. Work was focused on an apparently attached
structure, on a stone slab pavement at the front of the house, and on running
a one meter-wide trench through the house from front to back. This house was
targeted for investigation because artifacts found on the beach suggested that
the site would be Late Kachemak in age and because surface depressions showed
that the two parts of the house might be joined. Excavation showed that the
two structures actually were joined, not simply by a narrow tunnel, but by a
broad one-meter-wide passage. The “annex,” which seems to have been
the smaller part of the compound structure, was not completely uncovered, but
the area where the two structures joined was fully excavated. The interior was
found to have hearths and clay-lined pits; thus, unlike the side rooms of Koniag
houses which were mainly sleeping rooms, it could have functioned as a house.
Numerous stone slabs were found part way down in the fill. Apparently the annex
was partially in-filled, either from in-place accumulation of debris or from
trash thrown in from the adjacent house. Then it was floored by slate slabs
measuring up to one meter long, and occupation continued. Some of the slabs
were highly inclined, thus they might also have been on the roof. The stone slab pavement at the
front of the house was overlain by a thin layer of artifact-bearing dirt from
the site occupation. The slabs then overlay a much thicker deposit of occupational
debris. This debris filled the end of a trench that extended into the main structure.
And the trench itself had been dug into an earlier site deposit. It was on the
floor of the trench, at its very end, that the cache of “war” arrowheads
was found. A complex history of house occupation
and rebuilding seems to be indicated. First, there was a dugout house with sunken
entry passage. Then the house was abandoned or rebuilt and at that time the
entry was filled with soil and refuse. Then the stone patio was laid down. When
it was uncovered, the stone surface was very uneven but that might be due to
slumping over the past 1,400 years. At Aleut Town (Afg-004), parts
of two very late Kachemak semisubterranean houses were uncovered. Most of the
north house was excavated, but one end had to be left so as not to disturb a
government survey monument. If there was any entry, it was at the unexcavated
end or at a corner that had been removed by historic construction. The area
uncovered measured nearly four meters (13 feet) square and we surmise that it
could have extended at least one meter farther in one direction. This is the
same size order as the Uyak and Tsunami site houses. Floor features included
three pits without any clay lining. One pit was covered by two large slate slabs,
another pit was partially covered by slabs. The pits had no noteworthy contents,
just voids and loose soil. Between two pits there was a slate slab hearth surrounded
by a clay apron. Thinner slate slabs lay over the top of the hearth. They might
have been a cooking surface. Six post holes were positioned along the east wall
and near one corner. The west wall and part of the south wall were not exposed.
There were two distinct dark floor streaks at the base of the housepit, but
there were almost no artifacts on the floors. Evidently, the occupants had been
tidy house keepers. There was later occupation within the same structure pit:
a large stone lamp was found upside down on a partial sandy floor at 97 cm depth,
while the main floor was at 144-154 cm and deeper. It is not unusual for lamps
to be turned over, possibly in accord with some ancient belief. KONIAG TRADITION, AD 1200 TO HISTORIC ALUTIIQ The Koniags were the ancestors of the Alutiiqs prior to the historic changes effected by Russian contact and other outside impacts since the conquest of Kodiak in 1784. The term “Alutiiq,” (plural Alutiit, often anglicized to Alutiiqs), which first entered the area as “Aleut” through Russian usage, is useful for referring to the post-contact phase of the Koniag tradition. Some persons use "Alutiiq" also to refer to the inhabitants of the Kodiak archipelago back to the time of the initial peopling of Kodiak. This usage has a degree of legitimacy as the same people appear to have lived in the area from that time onward. The Native people of the Kodiak
Archipelago are among the better-documented North American tribes. That is so
because of early written accounts, referred to as historical ethnographies;
artifact collections that date back as far as the last decades of the 1700s;
and because of the remarkable recovery of ceremonial objects and other wooden
artifacts from late-dating “wet” (waterlogged) sites. Koniag remains
of the 600 years preceding the historic period are closely linked to the people
whom the Russians subjugated. This is the starting point for backstreaming,
or extending the historic identification of peoples back in time. It becomes
more difficult to identify the carriers of Kachemak culture as Koniags or ancestral
Alutiit, although that seems to be the case, at least in part. There is a considerable
degree of cultural continuity between the Koniag and Kachemak traditions. It
is much more tenuous to identify the Ocean Bay people of 7,500 to 4,000 years
ago as ancestral Koniags (hence ancestral Alutiiqs), but again there is some
cultural continuity between Ocean Bay and Early Kachemak, although the evidence
is not strong. Throughout time, there may have been additions to the original
population, but there is no firm evidence for complete population replacement
on Afognak or Kodiak at any time by conquest and migration. The Alutiit are
an Eskimo people. Their ethnicity, culture, and language undoubtedly have evolved
or changed in situ. Otherwise we would be faced with the logical conclusion
that if Ocean Bay was ancestral Alutiiq, it also is ancestral Eskimo. To say
that ancestral Eskimos lived on Kodiak and Afognak 7,500 years ago strongly
favors placing the very origin of Eskimos in this region. Most prehistorians
and linguists are not enthusiastic to endorse such a proposition, though many
will accede that Eskimos may have originated, or that Eskimo culture developed,
in the area extending southward from Bering Strait to Shelikof Strait. The Koniag or Qikertarmiut (Island)
Eskimos, among whom are counted the Alutiiq ancestors of the Afognak islanders,
numbered about 8,000 at time of Russian conquest in 1784. However, the existence
of many large abandoned second millennium A.D. Koniag archaeological sites on
all the islands and inlets of the archipelago suggests that there may have been
even more people earlier. Alutiiq hunting techniques were
so well-adapted that they continued in use after European contact in order to
meet the requirements of the fur trade and colonial subsistence. Much of Koniag
technology was similar to that of the preceding Kachemak tradition, although
there also was ongoing development. Some of the tools now used on Kodiak are
stylistically similar to ones used along the Bering Sea coast, as well. The
meaning of this has been the subject of scholarly discussion. It is debated
whether there was a major migration from the mainland or southern Bering Sea
to Kodiak. Nevertheless, Koniag culture came to resemble in many specific ways
that of Bering Sea Eskimos, while maintaining links to the Aleutian Islanders
and Northwest Coast peoples. Some Koniag artifacts are highly distinctive to
the Pacific Coast, and in this manner set the Koniags apart from more northerly
speakers of Eskimo languages. Examples are petroglyphs, long slender ground
slate whaling dart tips employed in a method of whaling very different from
Eskimo harpooning, use of aconite poison, probable mummification, and spruce
root basketry. The last is found even where there are no spruce trees, as at
Karluk, necessitating that the roots, or the baskets, be imported. In addition,
there was a local type of kayak (baidarka) different from even that of the adjacent
Aleutian Islands and Bristol Bay. The Koniag tradition, beginning
about 1,200 AD, is confined to the brief period of 600 years prior to European
contact (plus a post-contact phase). Some archaeologists propose a Kachemak-Koniag
transitional stage of a century or more in duration, although this is not well-
defined. Most archaeologists also propose an Early Koniag phase 1,200-1,400
A.D.. This is followed by a Late Koniag phase, interpreted by some as “Developed
Koniag,” but identification of certain artifacts as “Transitional,”
“Early Koniag,” or “Developed Koniag” remains highly
uncertain. The sequence proposed for diagnostic period or phase artifacts at
Karluk may apply only imperfectly to other parts of the Kodiak archipelago.
Thus the basis for this scheme of periodization is weakened, as are the concomitant
assumptions regarding the development of cultural complexity in Koniag society
and lifeways. For instance, on Afognak splitting adzes, incised pebble figurines
(both said to be “Developed Koniag”, boat or arch-shaped projectile
end blades and long ground slate spear points with diamond cross-section (said
to be “Early” or “Transitional”) are contemporary, unlike
the sequencing of artifact styles at Karluk. Nevertheless, not all change was
simultaneous, nor was it instantaneous. Kachemak and Koniag styles coexisted
for a while, as in the case of the shape of compound fish hooks. The actual
style differences are too arcane to be discussed here, as is also the case for
many other Koniag-Kachemak distinctions. Some features of Koniag and Kachemak
stone lamp decoration occur together for a while. Change from Kachemak to Koniag,
though not necessarily sudden, was more than a subtle transition. Almost everything
that had been Late Kachemak changed in the succeeding Koniag tradition during
the centuries 1,000 to 1,400 A.D, but the differences often are very slight,
in the position of the line hole in a harpoon dart head, for instance. Nevertheless,
some changes were not so minor and have major implications for social institutions
and regional interactions. Pottery, for example, appeared locally, but never
became adopted on all parts of Kodiak, and is missing from Afognak. This distribution
demonstrates local differences that existed among the Alutiit, who probably
were not a single tribe. Late in time, the Koniags also obtained a few tools
pounded from native copper, a material traded from the mainland to the northeast. The most fascinating artifacts
are beach pebbles and fragments of split slate sheets upon which stylized human
faces have been scratched. Often the figurines are clothed. A few examples hold
a hoop rattle, and thus provide suggestive clues that the figurines portray
dancers at festivals. But they are found at both main, or winter, sites and
summer salmon fishing camps, so their use was not limited to seasonal festivals.
Some details of clothing and personal adornment, such as labrets, can be seen
in the figurines, but there is no portrayal of weapons, boats, interacting persons,
groupings of artifacts, drums, etc. They appear mainly in Koniag times, used
in a ritual for which thousands of these figures were produced and discarded
at such sites as Settlement Point on Afognak, Adze (near Litnik), Marka Bay,
Monashka Bay, Gull Light (Uganik Bay), and Karluk. Some incised tablets are
so rudimentary, showing a few facial features only, that they could have been
scratched out and discarded in two seconds, but at one site on Spruce Island,
people sometimes took the trouble to grind or rub the figurine blank smooth.
Others are very detailed and elaborate, portraying strings of beads by tiny
circles, labrets, clothing fringes, feathers, possibly hair, sewn clothing panels,
and elaborate parka collars. These pieces were not made hastily. While some
are “clothed,” some look uncovered and appear to portray female
breasts. For most, there is no clue to gender. The figurine “cult”
appears to have lapsed at least a century before the Russians arrived. But by
the time it went out on Kodiak, the practice, and possibly some of the underlying
belief, had been copied by ancestral Tlingit Indians located from Yakutat to
Sitka. This provides a clue that relationships around the Gulf of Alaska were
not always hostile and that Alutiiqs and Tlingit ancestors interacted socially
before the Russians arrived. A large Afognak Bay collection,
and much information on houses and diet, were recovered through controlled excavations
led by Patrick Saltonstall at Settlement Point for the Afognak Native Corporation.
Eight houses are recognized from surviving surface outlines. Every house was
tested archaeologically. Radiocarbon dating shows that one house was occupied
about 1,350 A.D., with all the rest about 1,500 A.D. and 1,600 A.D., give or
take a few decades. It was possible, though, through geological and archaeological
data, to further refine the sequence of house construction and abandonment.
For example, artifact styles and radiocarbon dating suggest that occupation
was during the early part of the Koniag tradition, although it continued until
somewhat later. Additionally, when House 1 was abandoned, the pit was filled
with midden refuse generated by neighboring households, where continuing occupation
was more recent. One of these was House 2, which itself was abandoned before
the circa 1,600 A.D. tsunami, as tsunami sand is found in the old slumped house
depression. The site is not likely to have been occupied much earlier than House
1, as there had been a large earthquake about 1,200 A.D. The site terrain subsided
below the waves, which built a new storm berm that can be seen today behind
the houses. Then the land rebounded and people built houses on the beach in
front of the berm. In another major earthquake that occurred about 1,600 A.D.,
the land subsided at least 70 cm, some houses were flooded, and the site was
abandoned. This time, the broad gravel berm behind the contemporary beach was
built. Many dwellings may have been occupied concurrently, thus a village population
of between 80 and 120 persons can be proposed. It is clear from the radiocarbon
dates that there were at least two generations of houses; Saltonstall feels
that three generations are likely. Larger, multi-roomed Koniag
houses, compared with Kachemak houses, are interpreted as evidence of population
increase, as well as evidence for a change in family social structure and community
organization. The overwhelming abundance of complex Koniag-style housepits at
salmon streams, such Portage River (Perenosa Bay), the Karluk River, Ayakulik
River, and elsewhere further suggests population increase during Koniag times,
though that remains unproven. A short period of occupancy could account for
the large number of houses. There also are many small Late Kachemak houses on
the streams, each one hardly large enough to hold a nuclear family. Implements found at Settlement
Point include bone arrows used to hunt birds, harpoon heads of both toggling
and barbed non-toggling barbed formats, fish hook shanks and barbs, notched
cobble line weights, hones and whetstones, and numerous greenstone planing adze
bits, which is a characteristic of the Koniag tradition. Unlike at most Koniag
sites, there were almost no splitting adzes. This supports the view of some
archaeologists that splitting adzes were rare before 1,600 A.D. Other artifacts
include elongate ground slate dart or spear heads with diamond cross section;
ground slate ulus; labrets, including some fashioned of ivory or of jet; a rare
imported tusk-shaped dentalium shell bead; stone lamps; and several hundred
incised pebble figurines. The spearheads with diamond cross section are a distinctive
regional “horizon” style that spread quickly throughout the region
from Prince William Sound to the western Alaska Peninsula early in the second
millennium A.D. They show that the peoples along the coast were “connected.”
Another distinctive style of
Koniag arrow or spear tip that appeared somewhat later, and was used into historic
times, is the arch-shaped or boat-shaped blade that was inserted into the end
of arrow and toggle harpoon heads. Initially, the blades were plain flat boat-shaped
pieces. Later, they were grooved or slotted along the faces near the base. Finally,
they were provided with a carved bed at the base, for insertion into a narrow
slot at the end of the spear or arrow. This style (actually two sub-styles)
is well represented also from sites that border Bristol Bay and the Nushagak-Kuskokwim
River region. Again, widespread contact between Eskimo villages is indicated.
Shelikof Strait and the Alaska Peninsula were not significant barriers. Recovery
of dentalium confirms that trade goods from British Columbia reached Kodiak
in precontact times. Previously on Kodiak, dentalium was limited to ethnographic
paraphernalia of the historic period. The Koniags developed a complex
rectangular house with a large central common room, nine yards square in one
early Settlement Point example (House 1), and with several appended side chambers.
Each attached chamber was occupied by a family which cooked in the common room.
One room was for the steam bath. In the early 19th century, a house could have
had 18 to 20 occupants. Houses were dug into the ground (semisubterranean).
Dwellings built in this manner may have been easier to heat and provided better
protection against storms and cold than ones built fully above the surface.
Koniag construction, and probably that of its predecessors, was of the post
and beam mode. Posts were erected—low ones near the walls, higher posts
near the center—then beams were strung from post to post. Split slabs
of wood were leaned against, or placed over, the beams. These in turn were banked
and covered with turf for insulation and thatched to shed water. Portions of
the walls may have been built of stacked sod alone, but they could have been
faced with matting. Driftwood was the source for timber, and we can surmise
that it was in short supply after local accumulations were used up during the
initial settlement of a locality. Accordingly, floors were covered only with
grass, and sometimes gravel, which was renewed from time to time. Dried food
was stored inside the house. The little-cabin-on-posts type of cache appears
to be a Russian introduction, though earlier there probably were racks or stages
on posts for keeping kayaks and other paraphernalia off the ground. At Settlement
Point, there were large clay-lined storage or food preparation pits within the
houses. Kachemak houses also had numerous clay-lined pits, but of smaller size. These large multifamily Koniag
houses were very different from the small Late Kachemak houses. As Saltonstall
expresses it, “Four hundred years prior to the occupation of Settlement
Point, Alutiiq peoples lived in small (c. 20 square meters) single family dwellings.
Yet when the Russians arrived in the late 1700’s they reported that the
Alutiiq had chiefs, kept slaves and that several related families lived in one
large (c. 60 square meters), multiple roomed house.” Pits from abandoned
houses are large rectangles with one or two smaller subrectangular pits on the
outside along each wall, joined to the main room by a short passage. This type of Koniag house apparently
was developed soon after or concomitant with the beginning of the Koniag tradition,
which was sometime between 1,200 and 1,250 A.D. As yet, the details of its history
are not fully understood, but research by the Alutiiq Museum is working out
the chronology of such features as sunken or cold-trap entries, small appended
corner rooms, the proliferation of appended rooms, and enlargement of the main
room. A large fully-developed example with many distinctive architectural features
is Settlement Point House 1, dated to between 1,300 and 1,400 A.D. Elsewhere,
in 2004 Saltonstall found smaller houses with relatively small main rooms, fewer
or no distinctive architectural elements such as stone slab boxes and clay-line
pits, and only one or two attached chambers that date to 1,100-1,200 A.D. These
are some of the earliest Koniag houses on Kodiak. At this time, we do not know
if their characteristics precede developed Koniag or are a local peculiarity
of the site, which is on Uganik Island. We noted from Afognak that Late Kachemak
houses sometimes had two rooms, each reflected by a separate structure depression
and its own hearth. Each house pit at Settlement
Point had between one and eight side rooms. The appended rooms were slightly
higher than the main room, and were entered through a hatch, it seems, and a
tunnel dug down about 16 inches lower than the floor. This type of entry formed
a cold trap to prevent cold air from flowing out of the central room into the
side chambers. These rooms were relatively small, about 10 feet square. In addition to the hearths and
charcoal-rock cooking pits, each Settlement Point house has several storage
or food preparation features built into the floor. These consist of clay lined
pits, slate boxes and, evidently, wooden boxes. The largest house has eight
clay-lined pits, three slate boxes, and traces of one wooden box. The clay-lined
pits are much larger than comparable features found in Kachemak sites, being
3 to 6 feet in diameter and 1.5 feet or more deep. There is tentative evidence
that the clay pits contained salmon. The salmon would have kept cool in the
subfloor environment, and the pits, being made of clay, could have been sealed
at the top to produce an air-free chamber in which the fish would ferment, but
would not spoil. Slate boxes also were set into the floor. The slate lids had
a slot for a hand grip. In one house, the lid and sides of the box were sealed
together with clay and a hole through the lid also was capped and sealed. But
the contents had disappeared without a trace: the interior of the box was an
utter void even though the seal had not been broken for five centuries. The
Settlement Point investigation places food storage and cooking at a more prominent
level than previously had been thought to be the case for the Kodiak Archipelago.
The evidence includes recognition of charcoal and rock-filled “barbeque”
pits. Some clay pits and a few slate
boxes were filled with fire-cracked cobbles that differ from the usual slate
“banya rock” also found at the site. These appear to be cooking
features. Pits, boxes, and other features in the house floors are so numerous
that it almost would have been impossible to move about inside. Some pits probably had been
abandoned and had been filled in while others were in use. Careful investigation
of the entry to one house shows that it probably was a cold trap. In this type,
the roof of the entry is lower than the floor of the interior room, thus keeping
cold air from flowing in. (It would be better to call this “a warm trap.”)
Although only the elevation of the entry floor was observable, the roof could
be adjusted through the use of baffles to lower it below the floor of the interior
room. Where well-preserved house depressions are present, as is the case from
the 2003-2004 Alutiiq Museum surveys of the Ayakulik River, depressions can
be seen in house and side room entries that apparently indicate cold-trap construction.
The initial entryway where the cache of war points was found at the Salmon Bend
site described earlier may have been a cold trap, but after it was filled in,
that no longer would have been the case. This mode of construction probably
was imported from the north. Its presence on Kodiak and Afognak needs to be
better dated. Additional Koniag houses were partially uncovered in the 1951 and 1996 test excavations at Adze, located across from Rivermouth Point (AFG-012). One feature found there, but not at Settlement Point, is a stone-slab-covered sub-floor drain. A house pit had been dug down to impervious glacial till, hence the need for the drain. The Settlement Point houses built on gravel did not need drains. Hrdlicka found well-constructed drains with slate slab walls and covers at the Uyak site, but he misinterpreted them as walks. None of the Late Kachemak houses described earlier had floor drains, probably because the local topography was slightly raised and drainage was not required. Multiple microstratified floor layers, consisting mainly of compressed grass, and boulders piled as many as five high and which probably were part of a wall, were seen at the eroded face at Adze. The wall is of especial interest inasmuch as otherwise “piled” stone construction has not been demonstrated for Koniag times. The Historic Period Historic period deposits and houses have been excavated at Katanee (Quataat), the small short-term Kazakovskii site, and at the Aleut Town. Also, historic Alutiiq-type houses and historic activity areas have been identified near the mouth of the Afognak River at Litnik, at Malina Creek, and at Little Afognak. Kataaq in the Russian Period This occupied place near Settlement Point, on the east side of Afognak Bay, also is called Katanie. There are extremely few references to Kataaq, probably because in most instances the inhabitants are merged with nearby Aleut Town and Afognak odinochka. There is a report that when Saint Herman died in 1836, a column of light, joining heaven and earth, appeared in the sky over Spruce Island, and was seen by the inhabitants of Kataaq, including Anna Nytsmyshkinak and her Creole husband Gerasim Vologdin (Korsun 2002: 97-98). This is the earliest documentary date we have found that we have to associate with the settlement by name, but indications of a settlement in this vicinity appear on Russian charts as early as 1786-1787. A zilishche [habitation or village] is indicated on the engraved chart compiled by Vil’brekht in 1786 (based on the surveys by Izmailov; published in Black 1992:Fig. 6). This unnamed zhilishche apppears to be either on an islet or promontory in the vicinity of the mouth of Kazakof Bay (Danger Bay), but shoreline details are rudimentary and imprecise. Islets in this area are not suitable for permanent settlements. In 1787, the Russians set up an artel a few miles away at Igwik or Little Afognak. Kataaq is not in the 1795 and
1804 censuses of Alutiiq villages, probably because it was established later.
Moreover, Katharine Woodhouse-Beyer’s excavations (2001) at Kataaq have
not brought up evidence of a precontact occupation at the site, which helps
set it off as a postcontact settlement. She recovered the foundations or floors
of six Russian period structures and miscellaneous feature pits, together with
an artifact assemblage which convincingly demonstrates a settlement possibly
occupied by Creoles (or Russians) together with Native persons. She suggests
that this is the site of the Afognak artel. There is firm evidence, however,
that the Afognak artel was located at the site later called Little Afognak.
This evidence consists of a label “Company settlement” at the appropriate
location on Lisianskii’s 1805 chart (published in “atlas”
1812), Davydov’s 1803 identification of the main Afognak artel as Igvetskaia,
and a Spanish map showing discoveries up to 1792 that has a Russian post in
Izhut Bay. The last location is a short distance east of Igwik or Igvet, but
presumably was misplaced on the very crude outline of Afognak Island. Igwik
is the locality of Little Afognak, so stated by Afognak elders. Woodhouse-Beyer
obtained tree ring dates for foundation posts from the only house at the site
that had a brick (Russian) stove. They indicate construction in the 1820s (Woodhouse
Beyer 2001). After 1849, there is a gap in
the records of about 20 years. Then in 1871-1872, Alphonse Pinart collected
masks here. Seventeen years later, a notation on a map dated March, 1888, signed
by Davidson (copy seen by Clark at University of Alaska-Fairbanks) identified
this settlement as Little Afognak. This undoubtedly was an error, even though
it would have been appropriate. We assume that that notation was meant for Selezneva,
located a considerable distance to the east. The 1891 census states that "Catanee"
is included in the count for Afognak, as it was most other years, except in
1910, when the U.S. Census enumerated a Nekrasov family of five persons living
there. Occupation by this family continued at least until 1935, as it is listed
in a BIA census. The Russian and Tlingit Nekrasoff family came to Kodiak soon
before, or in the beginning of the 1850s, according to Church records. It is
tempting to speculate that they lived continuously at Kataaq, bridging the Russian
and American periods. Woodhouse-Beyer states that one of the numerous Naumov
families also had a “homestead” at Kataaq close to the time that
it was depopulated. Church records and family tradition tell that the two families
were linked by marriage. Woodhouse-Beyer does not report
on the American period remains she recovered. Apparently, some American houses
occupied the same sites or foundations as Russian period houses, and artifacts
from the two occupations were not always [easy] to separate. She proposed that
the location was vacated after the smallpox epidemic of 1838, but was reoccupied
later. It is not clear, though, that it actually had been vacated. Since it
appears on maps that postdate the epidemic but precede the American period,
we believe that it continued to be occupied. No two structures were alike.
One large house had plank floors, a brick stove flanked by slate flagstones,
and yielded abundant glass beads and many fragments of glass window panes. It
apparently was constructed without the use of any nails. The excavator proposed
that the walls were formed by planks, but does not demonstrate how this conclusion
was reached. This structure would have been occupied by Creoles, and by Russians,
if any of the latter were living in the settlement. Unless it served also as
a store or storehouse, the space could have accommodated two families. An undated
saw pit is located near the houses. Other houses are slightly dug into the ground,
but none is a typical Alutiiq barabara. The artifact assemblage is varied
and includes some art carvings in bone and ivory as well as a large number of
glass beads but, strangely, no nails, although nails are common at other Russian
period sites. An appreciable number of small harpoon heads was found, some of
them made so precisely in a historic Aleutian Island style that one can conclude
that they came from the Aleutians or that their maker was an Aleut who came
to Kodiak. We know that in 1784, or soon after, Shelikhov brought a number of
Fox Island Aleuts to Kodiak, some of whom were sent to Afognak. In addition to window glass,
mica window panes were common. We have noted that the settlement is not likely
to have been the one referred to as the Afognak artel, in part because it was
only three miles across the bay to the odinochka, which appears to have been
especially substantial for an odinochka, and in many ways was like an artel.
Nevertheless, the artifact assemblage is much like what might be expected from
an artel frequently visited and staffed by Native people and Creoles. It has
perplexing aspects, too: lack of fishing gear, scant presence of fox trap prongs,
and lack of nails, for instance. The locality was not yet completely abandoned after 1935. In the 1940s, one Nekrasov family lived in a house and had a small barn, both built on the gravel bar between the stream and the bay. In 1951, there were still two small single room modified barabaras in the woods between the stream and the bay, huts where trappers or gillnetters stayed. The stream there carries a run of silver salmon that is not large, but appreciable considering the tiny size of the creek which has been dammed, but not completely blocked by beavers. The beaver are a relatively recent introduction. Kazakovskii Zaliv A small Creole
settlement existed there in 1860s-1870s. This settlement is not indicated on
any map. The Alutiiq name for the settlement may be Mautaq, recorded by the
Native Village of Afognak place names project in 2001. Kazakovskii Bay settlement
appears in Church confessional records for 1867 only. The 16 members of the
community were comprised of the Iakushev, Mikhail Seleznev, and widow N. Kostyleva
families. All of these families had close kin at Little Afognak (Seleznevo).
The settlement apparently existed for only a few years before and after 1867.
It appears that the church records usually included its inhabitants with the
nearby parent village of Seleznevo (Little Afognak). By 1871, Kostylev’s
daughter had married and moved to Afognak. ALEUT TOWN AT THE AFOGNAK RIVER SETTLEMENTS AT AFOGNAK BAY
Cobble spalls seem also to have been used to process fish,
to cut through tough fish skin. The combined cobble spall (boulder flake) and
ulu blade frequency is nearly equal between the two occupations, at 26.8 percent
for the Koniag area and 23.4 percent for the Kachemak area. It seems, then,
that on a per-capita basis processing salmon was of about equal importance during
each period, although more people may have been at the fishery in the later
period. SUBSISTENCE ECONOMY Cormorants also were most
common at Afg-012.
Description of Afognak Sites THE SURVIVAL OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL
RECORD
Aleut Town 1999 and 2000 Tsunami Site 2001, 2003 THE PLACE OF AFOGNAK IN ANCIENT
TIMES The example of knife and spear hafts appears to fit this scenario. In Ocean Bay II times, the stems of ground slate knife blades and spear heads often were finely notched or serrated to assist fixing to a haft. This practice was carried over into Early Kachemak times. Stem serration also was popular in Late Kachemak times, but mainly on Kodiak Island itself (and Chirikof Island). By then, this practice had gone out of style on Afognak. There were many other regional differences, but altogether an extensive repertoire of Kachemak technology and cultural practice pervaded the greater region. Afognak Data Recovery Project© 2005 Native Village of Afognak 204 E. Rezanof, Ste. 100, Kodiak, Alaska 99615 907-486-6357 • www.afognak.org |
Afognak History ~ Afognak Timeline ~ Ancient Afognak ~ Afognak After Russian Contact ~ Afognak Relocation ~ Oral History ~ Photo Gallery |
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