The site of 3,500 to 2,500 year old houses found at Amaknak Bridge is the only one of its kind in North America and its remains reveal new human and animal migration theories, Zooarchaeologist Dr. Susan Crockford said Thursday at Washington State University (WSU) during her presentation about her fieldwork at the Unalaskan Island site threatened by road construction.
“These houses had actual chimneys with a fire hearth at the bottom—built into the wall. It’s a style of structure that is not seen anywhere else,” Crockford said.
The site had several houses up against each other that had covered rock-lined channels in the floor leading to the fire place. Crockford said some archaeologists there attributed the channels to central heating, but “my interpretation is that these are actually drafts to keep an open fire burning under really windy conditions.”
Crockford’s presentation, “Climate change in the North Pacific: Zoogeographical implications of mid-Holocene sea ice expansion in the Bering Sea,” explained how certain species of animal remains from 3,500 to 2,500 years ago proved that the Eastern Aleutian Island climate and landscape was arctic due to a neo-glacial ice expansion of the Bering Sea from 4,700 to 2,500 years ago.
Crockford said the climate conditions present when the site was occupied 3,500 to 2,500 years ago were very similar to those today in the Bering Strait. The sea ice was so far south that it created an arctic environment in the Eastern Aleutians. Crockford said it was “an unprecedented situation in historic times—that’s for sure."
Of the 76 species of birds, and land and sea mammals Crockford identified, many breed only in certain seasons and climatic environments. The abundance of certain juvenile and infant remains, such as the ringed, bearded and fur seals proved the ice must have been present as late as June or July most years, Crockford said.
Archaeologist Dr. Colin Grier, an assistant professor at WSU, said he “liked that she used a single site to re-open an old question—how did the Thule (pre-Inuit) actually populate the entire North American Arctic?”
Grier said Crockford did not present global climate data to back her theory and he was skeptical of Crockford’s use of a lack of sites in the Bering Sea as evidence to prove the area was iced over.
Grier also said he did not agree that the Thule were descendents of Aleut, but more “likely a conglomerate of many peoples and cultural practices that came together about 2,000 years ago in the Bering Strait.”
Crockford said people with a culture distinctly adapted to arctic conditions and hunting, “including whales (The Thule People),” migrated across the arctic from Alaska to Greenland about 1,000 years ago.
“This site was occupied well before that time but has many similar artifact elements,” she said.
Grier said there was still unexplained data, but the presentation was interesting and well-delivered.
“The intertwining of ice floes (sic), human movement/adaptation and climate was great,” Grier said. “What stood out was the uniqueness and significance of the site, and although not amplified in the talk, that the site is now trashed to make way for a new bridge, so we will learn nothing more.”
Crockford said her team carefully surveyed a small portion of the site for as much archaeological data as possible. She said she cringed at the thought of a bunch of graduate students hacking the site apart with a gardening tool—others that examined it later quickly unearthed the rest with a back hoe to get a more general gist of the site as a whole.
"It actually was a salvage project,” Crockford said. “They were rerouting the road leading to the airport. It was a big job—I think they allowed 6 months to excavate as much as could be done in this site, and then they were going to bulldoze the whole thing."
Dr. Crockford is a Zooarchaeologist with Pacific Identifications Inc., Victoria, B.C., Canada.
Contacts:
Dr. Susan Crockford,
sjcrock@shaw.ca,
http://pacificid.com/Dr. Colin Grier,
cgrier@wsu.edu,
http://www.libarts.wsu.edu/anthro/faculty/grier.html
