Video
Archeology and Climate Change in Northwest Alaska
Transcript
Karen: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to ArcheoThursday. My name is Karen Mudar, and I am your host. I'm and archeologist in the NPS Washington Archeology Program, which is sponsoring this series. This fall and winter, we're exploring the Anthropocene and climate change in archeology. We have a wonderful set of speakers focusing on the anthropogenic environment in archeology.
Today, however, we're going to continue investigating both climates. Shelby Anderson, at Portland State University, is going to talk to us about her research in Northwest Alaska. Our lasting colleagues may me familiar with at least some of here projects, as she's carried out research at Cape Krusenstern National Monument. I hope some of our Alaskan colleagues are able to join us today.
Shelby was drawn to archeology through learning about the prehistory of the Pacific Northwest, where she grew up, and she's been gradually moving north, ever since. She became interested in the ceramics from an excavation project that she worked at, on the Alaskan Peninsula. A particular focus on ceramics production by Alaskan foragers has become one piece of a research program that has encompassed two overlapping themes: studying hunter gatherers subsistence from a technological perspective, and secondly, studying past social networks and socioeconomic organization in hunter gatherer groups. I hope that she'll talk a little bit about her ceramic research today, because I am very surprised that there is much of a body of ceramic research, and am eager to hear more about it.
She says that today she's going to discuss how new data on past settlement patterns and social networks in Northwest Alaska can be used to evaluate and refine existing models of Late Holocene human-environment interaction in the arctic and to inform contemporary climate change research in the North.
She also will talk about ongoing efforts to assess and mitigate the impact of rapid climate change on arctic archeological sites. You're probably aware of the challenges that the village of Shishmaref, located on an island to the north of Cape Krusenstern, is currently facing. The increased severity of winter storms is causing big chunks of land, sometimes with houses on them, to be torn away and deposited in the ocean, and people are relocating to other communities.
Although less well publicized, and not as dramatic, the loss of archeological resources through coastal erosion is as much a tragedy and affects all of us, not just people of Alaska. Although, it's probably not good news, I'm eager to hear what Anderson has to say about this.
Thanks for being with us today, Shelby.
Shelby: Thanks so much for inviting me to talk, and for everyone here to listen to me. I like to start with this slide just to give people an idea of where I work, a sense of the place, although, you've introduced it really well, Karen.
I work in one of the few parts of Alaska where you can actually see Russia. I took this photo from in front of my tent in 2013. In the foreground is a herd of, what we debated in the field, and decided was a mix of domestic reindeer and caribou. In the distance, on a clear day, you can actually see the Diomede Islands and the Chukchi Peninsula. That gives you a little idea of where I'm at in Alaska.
Just a map to get us further situated. That photo was taken here, and I am going to talk a bit about my work at Cape Krusenstern, and a little bit about Cape Espenberg, so I placed it on the map here. For those of you who are less familiar with Alaska, the area where I've been working is up here in the box, and this is Anchorage, far to the south.
I have two related, but separate things that I want to talk about today. The first is to talk about how some of the past human environment interactions in northwest Alaska can contextualize modern climate change, and potentially contribute to contemporary climate change research. I'll draw on work at Cape Krusenstern, Espenberg, and some of my ceramic studies in talking about that.
Then I want to switch and talk a little bit about how contemporary climate change is impacting those arctic archeological sites and what we could potentially do about it. There I'll speak about a couple of projects that I'm working on with Park Service colleagues, in trying to plan for climate change in past archeological sites.
Before I dive into the archeology, I wanted to provide just a little context in terms of arctic climate change. It's happening, I don't think that's news to anybody. What is impressive is the rate of change in some parts of the arctic. We're seeing increased annual and seasonal temperatures. Mean annual temperatures in Alaska have increased an average of 1.7 degrees Celsius, just over the last six decades. We're seeing an increased number in snow and frost free days every year. This is contributing to drought stress, which results in increased fire activity and a longer fire season.
There's also shrub expansion, changes in vegetation communities, that impact wildlife and people. We're also seeing a decrease in glacial sea ice extent.
This picture here shows the change in glacier between 1919 and 2004. It's just one of many Such features. The change is happening, and climate models predict that many of these trends will continue into the future and in some cases the rate of change could increase.
How is climate change impacting people today in the North? Karen already mentioned the coastal village of Shishmaref. I have an image here from Shishmaref of one of the houses eroding right into the ocean, certainly not the only community in my study area where this kind of thing is happening. There's also mass erosion events on the river systems in the interior. So the effects aren't limited to the coast in any means. The lower photo here is of the Selawik River in the interior of the region, and a mass thaw slump that took place there.
Sea level rise, increased storm surges, permafrost melting, all these things can cause an erosion of infrastructure across the region. Certainly people are already observing changes in animal availability, both in abundance but also distribution and timing. This can make subsistence activities very difficult.
In addition, weather is becoming more unpredictable. Subsistence activities can in some cases be more dangerous than the were in the past. One particular difficulty that various local residents have reported is that unprecedented change means that knowledge that is passed down from prior generations is not as helpful as it would have been in the past. People are dealing with environmental conditions that that there isn't a precedent for.
More specifically, how is climate change impacting our resources? I think most of us have a sense of what this is, but I thought I'd give you a few examples. Certainly snow, ice and cover is really to increased wind erosion. When sites are exposed to the elements, they're protected by that snow and ice. Now there are longer periods in the year when sites aren't protected by snow and ice. That's resulting in increased wind and coastal erosion.
Permafrost thaw, this can destroy preservation and context within the site and exposes sites, especially when combined with things like increased storm surges on the coast can cause mass wasting events that destroy large portions of sites very quickly. That's something that I've certainly observed in my work on the coast of Kotzebue Sound.
You heard the talk last week by Craig Lee. He’s actually has done ice patch research in Alaska as well. I have an image here from a glacier in Yukon where archeologists have found artifacts in the retreating ice patch.
This kind of increased exposure certainly leads to new discoveries, but I doubt that these discoveries offset the negative of the impact of melting and other climate change and other issues on archeological sites.
I think there's also a potential for increased subsistence and illegal digging at sites that are newly exposed by climate change impact. That's something else to consider.
In Northwest Alaska, the coasts of the region are considered highly vulnerable to future climate change impacts. Recent study of coastal erosion along the northern Seward Peninsula coast indicates erosion rates between .54 and 1.25 meters per year.
This image is from a study done by Bill Manley and a group of other researchers a couple years ago where, in addition to some field work to measure erosion rates, they looked at historic remote imagery to come up with erosion rates. This particular image is from within one of my current study areas. You can see between 1950 and 2003, there has been over 78 meters, or 256 feet of the coast lost. There's quite a bit of archeology on the coast of this region that's already gone.
I think I don't need to talk too much about this, but I did want to think more broadly about what can archeological research contribute to climate change research outside of the field of archeology. The record that we're losing is one that has a great potential for addressing a lot of social and environmental issues around contemporary climate change.
Here are a few that Rockman outlined in a paper she wrote in 2011. One thing that archeology can provide is essentially a human barometer of climate change over the long term. There are environmental changes that have, and have had very little impact on people. Archeology is a way to understand at what scale does environmental change have meaning to people, and to give us a long record of that kind of relationship in human experience of climate change.
Archeology can also provide an ahistorical baseline, against which current or future change can be measured. I think this is one of the most clearly communicated things that archeology can do when we're talking to people outside of our discipline. Archeology can also provide a temporal context for a lot of current ideas, beliefs and practices around contemporary climate change. It can illuminate policy decisions being made at regional and local scales around climate change.
Last, in our archeological sites there is quite a bit of data on past environments at the very local scale. A scale that other kinds of climate proxies don't work at. They tend to be at a much larger scale. Through archeological … Through archeo-botanical materials, for example. There's a lot we can learn there about past climate from archeological sites. We can contribute that unique, smaller scaled climate data to climate change research.
The study of the past can certainly be valuable to understanding and coping with present change. It's important for contributing to policy and planning decisions and how do we actually do that. Well of course, I think we need new data. We need more information on past human-environment interactions. Here I can really just talk specifically about Northwest Alaska in saying that we've been looking at questions around human-environment interaction in our research in this region for a long time. A lot of the research in Northwest Alaska was done in the ‘50s or ‘60s, and so we don't have existing collections the kind of data we need to answer our contemporary questions about human-environment interaction. A lot of those older excavation projects were done without any screening or non-systematic recovery, or no recovery of faunal material, for example, so it just makes it really hard to use existing collections for many of our questions about past human-environment interactions now.
We also know local chronologies are flawed. Essentially we need more radiocarbon data. It makes it really hard to connect our archeological research with paleo environmental research. On top of that, it's becoming clear that the late Holocene-Paleo-environment was highly regionalized in it's variability, there's a need to develop records that can be correlated with archeology in addressing questions about past human-environment interaction.
Certainly, there's plenty of room for more research on past human-environment interaction in Northwest Alaska. Unfortunately, just as many of us are focusing our attention on this issue, we're also facing an unprecedented destruction of the record that we're interested in studying in this region. That's why I'm going back and forth in talking about these issues.
One project that I've been working on for some time with colleagues at University of Washington and at the National Park Service is some work at Cape Krusenstern National Monument. There, our broad goals were to evaluate the evidence of past human-environment interaction in this particular place, and consider factors and cultural vulnerability and resilience to past climate change. We looked specifically at improving the chronology, both the archeological and paleo-environmental chronology, past settlement patterns, social networks subsistence in paleo-environment reconstruction. I'm not going to talk about all of this, I thought I would just talk about some of the results of our chronological work, and settlement pattern data in relationship to environmental change.
The other thing is that I've been working on this as a part of a team of people, including Adam Freeburg, who was a graduate student with me at the University of Washington. He now works for the National Park Service in Fairbanks. And also Jim Jordan at the Antioch University of New England. Jim is the paleo-ecologist on this project, so I have to leave the paleo-ecological questions to him.
A little bit about Cape Krusenstern and why this is a good place to study human-environment interaction. It really is a special place. It was made a national monument because of these extensive past human occupations. It's an approximately 8,000 acre site complex. It contains many, many sites and I have some graphics and numbers to show you in a minute. The land form itself is a beach ridge sequence, and you can see that in the image here, which really is a unique archive of arctic coastal change. The ridges here can be integrated through geo-morphology and paleo-ecological studies to past shifts in coastal and near-coastal environments. We have a coupled archeological and environmental record in place.
Ridges form what's been called a horizontal stratigraphy, with archeological remains progressively older from the active beach to the lagoon. These are the oldest beach ridges here, and the youngest here, essentially. What you have in this image is about 5,000 years of archeology in one shot from the airplane window.
Generally speaking the beach ridges grow during fair weather periods and they erode during stormy periods, although we have learned through our projects and Jim's work that it's more complicated than that. Here in this picture you can see, perhaps, that there are changes in the ridge orientation, and those represent shifts in the coastal environment and the depositional regime.
This is a really good place to study a longer term record of coastal human-environment interaction. There are other similar systems in the region and there is a parallel project to this one going on at Cape Espenberg. It's really exciting to be working on this project at Cape Krusenstern and know that we'll be able to combine our data with other researches going on at the same time, in a similar place.
Prior researchers organized that beach ridge system into what they call beach segments, which represent both cultural periods and also episodes of specific depositional regimes, which were considered a proxy for the past coastal environment. You can see those here, represented by different colors, and dates are as they stood before we started the project. There were very few direct dates, actually, for many of these cultural periods at this site complex. That's part of what we worked on in our chronology building.
The work that we've done here before provided a basis for the regional culture history, and so there are some implications for our new chronology for the site for the larger region as well.
Adam and I and Jim worked at this site complex. We did four seasons of field work. The first was led by the National Park Service in 2006, and then by University of Washington in 2008, 2009 and 2010. By the time we finished the project we had surveyed about half of the site complex systematically. All the areas represented in different colors here. We dug innumerable shovel tests and 56 test excavations, and we've obtained 151 new radiocarbon dates.
We focused our efforts on collecting settlement data and radiocarbon dates and also did some testing to collect, mainly new archeological materials to answer some subsistence questions. That was our strategy behind our research design. I'd be happy to answer more questions about that, but I won't go into it now.
Just to get right into where we're at now, in terms of what we learned, we have new limiting agents for the beach segments. We learned that the occupation history of the site complex was much more complex that we previously thought, and that the occupation was nearly continuous over the last 4,200 years, which isn't necessarily what we expected going into the project, based on prior work and what we knew about the environment during this period.
Now I'll talk a little more about each of these. One of the ways that we've been analyzing our data is by creating some probability plots of radiocarbon dates, so that's what you're looking at here, to think about beach segment age and duration of occupation in each beach segment.
Here we have youngest beach segment going back in time, youngest here, then next oldest, going all the way back in time to beach ridge, beach segment 6, which is the oldest. Looking at these data, a rough proxy for population and for occupation history of the site complex, we were surprised to see that some of the beach segments were occupied for much longer time periods than we thought. For example, segments 1 through 3, based on prior archeological work we didn't think that people had lived in these sections of the site complex for as long as it turned out they did. We were also surprised to see some temporal overlap in occupation of different beach segments, which you can see here again, particularly between segment 2 and 3, for example.
One thing that we concluded from this is you have to be careful in drawing much larger conclusions about beach chronology from horizontal stratigraphy alone. You really need these kind of radiocarbon data to understand occupation at this large landscape. These dates are really important in terms of interpreting local settlement patterns, and then they have some broader implications as well. If we look here, we found that some of the upper, older limiting agents for beach segments were slightly older than previously thought, so these outlined in red here, these are the prior dates for those beach segments. Our dates are a bit older.
Certainly that has some implications for regional culture history, but also because prior paleo-environmental reconstruction relied on the archeological dates. These new dates could be coupled from long held environment settlement change links that were inferred from the record here at Cape Krusenstern before, and then applied to the larger region.
Looking at those radiocarbon dates all together, we realize that the earliest occupation was a bit earlier than we'd expected, about 4,200 years ago and, overall, it was more continuous. We had anticipated, based on prior works, that there would be larger interruptions in occupation or bigger drops in local population due to Late Holocene environmental variability.
One thought that we had out of this was perhaps people were more resilient to environmental change, they're certainly persistent in occupation at this place during periods of environmental change.
I have here Neoglacial, Medieval Climatic Optimum, and the Little Ice Age, are some significant events during this time period. You can see that overall, we have a persistent occupation of the site complex. Then we have here two periods of significant beach ridge erosion, where we have no archeological record locally.
The other possibility is that the local geomorphological system is more sensitive to slight or small scale environmental changes than we thought previously. That change might have had little impact on people who were living here, which is why we see a persistence in occupation overall. That's something that the paleo-ecologists will be exploring in more depth and hopefully will have more to say about that soon.
The other thing that we learned from our systematic survey was that the site complex was known to have been occupied extensively, but in our work we identified about three times ... We tripled the number of known sites at the site complex. We can say that occupation density is certainly greater than previous thought. We did a lot of work to incorporate the work from the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, with the help of the Haffenreffer Museum and some satellite imagery they had that Lou Giddings, who did the original research here, had marked site locations on. Again, I'd be happy to talk more about that, but I don't want to take up to much time here, unless there are specific questions about it.
We worked hard to incorporate the legacy data and get a sense of where, and how many sites had been recorded here previously. You can see that in the black bars on this graphic, and then our current project in the lighter gray.
The other thing that we found was evidence of increased residential sedentism over time. We looked at the different types of sites and features that we identified and here, if you just focus on the house features, which are in bright green, you can see that there's an increase in the number of houses over time at the site complex. As well as just an overall increase in occupation.
Overall, our results support the existing settlement model, but we saw less change over time and occupation than we had expected going into the project, and have hypothesized that this could be due to local resilience to environmental change over time. The settlement density was a lot greater than previously thought, particularly between one thousand and five hundred years ago. This really led us to a lot of other questions.
One thought, prior to our work, had been that this site complex, during certain time periods was sort of peripheral to regional system for people living here, and how [inaudible 00: 30: 16] they were, how much resources they had access to. With the new data on the on the density of site occupation I feel like it raises the question of whether or not this place was really peripheral to the regional sociopolitical system or not.
There are also some interesting things going on in our settlement radiocarbon data when we look at the post-500 BP time period. It's not clear if they're absent or if they're just living differently on the landscape, if there is some sort of taphonomic effect locally that's resulting in our identification of fewer sites. There are a lot of other interesting things going on during this time period, including the little Ice Age and increased interaction indirectly, possibly with the market economy in what is now Russia. The introduction of dog traction, and changing mobility...
As with a lot of work that this project has led to more questions than answers. If you want to know more about this project I'd be happy to answer questions at the end of this talk. I also wanted to mention that Adam and I have two articles, one of which just came out in the Journal of Island Coastal Archaeology and one that came out in Anthropology last year, talking in more detail about some of these things. Check those out if you're interested.
These are questions that we're ruminating on now, and have a relationship to Late Holocene environmental change in this region.
One particular part of this that I have focused on is this question of how connected is Cape Krusenstern to other sites in the region, and how in general connected or not connected were people across this region over the last few thousand years. I have been looking at this question through ceramic research. I thought I would talk just a little about this.
Some of the questions that have guided this work, again, is how connected or not connected were people over the last two thousand years? What happens to these social and economic spheres as mobility changes? What about as environment or other social systems change? Demography and character of interaction networks change over time?
After doing a pilot study to make sure that it was possible to locate ceramics from this region, based on the underlying geology. I undertook a larger study that involved ... Now I've analyzed close to 8,000 ceramics from 17 study sites. That includes Cape Krusenstern, Cape Espenberg, and numerous other sites, most of which are actually on park lands. They're marked in red triangles on this graphic.
I used a lot of museum collections in this case. Obviously I couldn't go out and collect all these materials. Also, ceramics that Adam and I collected at Cape Krusenstern. I analyzed about 8,000 ceramics at this point. 395 of those I had sourced using neutron activation analysis. I also did a clay survey and collected clay samples from across this region, and compared the results from the ceramic sourcing to the clay sourcing to gain an understanding of how ceramics were moved around and were created.
So this graphic is just one way of looking at those data and just how thinking about how different communities were connected.
Karen: Shelby, can I interrupt you for just a minute? Somebody in our audience does not have their phone on mute. Could you please put your phone on mute. Thank You.
Go ahead, Shelby.
Shelby: What did I learn from that ceramics study? One thing that we didn't know before I started this project was that ceramics actually did circulate around this region. That circulation was fairly wide, between 750 and 250 BP. It became clear to me that some regions or site complexes like Krusenstern were better connected than others, and I interpreted that from the number of different sources represented in the assemblages at those sites, in comparison to less well connected sites.
I also saw some clear shifts in the shape of those networks. In terms of changing source use before and after 500BP. Again, I think there's something really interesting going on there that's probably related to more than one factor, including both environmental change and changing mobility, and possibly changing transport costs with the introduction of dog traction.
So that is ongoing work, but these are some of the conclusions that I've come to thus far. In terms of looking at social networks and thinking about how those networks may change in relationship to environmental change.
What's next in terms of human-environment interaction research? I mentioned that there were other ongoing projects, including one at Cape Espenberg. I'm hoping to expand into the interior of the region and work on some of the less-studied rivers including the Selawik and the Buckland River region. To look at some, more specifically, at social networks and also to address some of the questions that were raised by our work at Cape Krusenstern. The regional archeology has been focused a lot on the coasts for a lot of good reasons, but we really need some data from the interior of both environmental and archeological to, basically, bolster our reconstruction of past human-environment interactions.
I want to switch gears and talk about a couple of other projects and the other side of this archeology and climate change research, and what I'm doing to try and help plan for climate change impact to arctic archeological sites. I already gave you some examples of how climate change is impacting sites and people in the region. What can we do about that? It's obviously an enormous problem that goes beyond one person’s work.
We can think about assessing and planning for climate change impact as sort of a three step process. At least this is how we've been talking about it in my work in northern Alaska. We can model site vulnerability to contemporary and future climate change. We can do on-the-ground site assessments. We can combine those sources of information in some kind of prioritization system so that we can make some decisions about mitigating climate change impacts. Which sites should we focus on? We can't save them all, all along the coasts here. Which sites do we think are the most important, and do we want to focus future research efforts on, before they erode away?
I've been working on two projects. One with Michael Holt, at the Western Arctic Park lands in Northwest Alaska, and another with Rhea Hood and other regional office staff in Alaska, in Anchorage. The modeling of site vulnerability to climate change impacts has been carried out mostly by the regional office staff, including Dael Davenport. She's essentially drawing spatial data about climate change projections and putting them into a GIS system. Then together we've been thinking about what factors make sites vulnerable to climate change. Things around the site setting, the geomorphology of a particular location, soil types aspect, the depositional and the erosional environment to come up with a model of predicting climate change impact. Then, adding to that a second model that predicts where sites might be located. The idea is to use that information to decide where in this vast area should we focus our field efforts, particularly given that so many parts of Alaska have never been investigated for archeology. How do we decide where to even go and look in the first place, particularly given the challenges of remote field work.
This image is just one snap shot from Deal Davenport's model. She's been testing the model using site data that I collected and other people have collected to improve the site vulnerability and prediction model.
I have been helping with that, and then I've been working more on developing and testing qualitative site assessment methods, thinking a lot about how we assess or predict hazards to archeological sites. How do we asses or predict present and future site vulnerability to those hazards. In this case we're thinking about climate change hazards or impact. Then combining that with site significance information to come up with some sort of calculation of site risk, or overall risk to climate change impact.
The approach that I've taken has been to create a matrix and I just grabbed a snap shot of it here where I thought about climate change impacts, current and predicted, in northern Alaska, what they're current or anticipated impact is and then think about what would make a site vulnerable to that particular hazard. Then I developed standardized forms for collecting information. The idea being that this method could be expanded beyond the work that I've done to other, at least northern Alaskan projects. I think I would have to be regionally developed a bit more, depending on where you’re working, because the site vulnerability factors would be different.
One of these site assessment projects has been on the northern Seward Peninsula coast. We've done two years of field work, surveyed thirty five miles along the coast there. This is within the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. This area was selected for this project because about two thirds of the study area have never been investigated for archeological sites. The rest of the study area was the subject of archeological research more than twenty years ago. Jean Schaaf, who gave a talk earlier this Fall, talked about some of the work she did in this area in the ‘80s. It was really exciting to get to revisit some of those sites as a part of this project.
We identified 30 new sites, and relocated 21 previously identified sites. We found that, of all of these, more than half are moderately to severely damaged, with significant loss of data in many cases. I'll show you just two examples here.
What was interesting is that going into the project, based in part on that GIS model of site vulnerability, I had expected coastal erosion to be the most common impact to archeological sites, but it was actually more frequently wind erosion in this region. I think that has a lot to do with the geomorphological setting. You can see these two examples here. Many of the sites that we found were in an extensive coastal dune system and they'd been heavily impacted by wind erosion.
This picture here, this is the remains of a semi-subterranean house. The sand becomes concretized underneath the house floor during occupation and so it's harder and it resists wind erosion. That's why that tends to be all that's left in these kinds of situations. This is concretized sand, a few pieces of wood that were part of the house structure itself. Very rarely, oddly, did we even find artifacts. I don't know if they're being buried or perhaps collected, is another possibility. On the right is a historic cabin that, pretty much all that's left is this one wall and some scattered metal debris.
A couple other examples from that site assessment project. There are several probable houses that remain intact in this dune feature they are deeply buried. We can tell here, in the shot from the beach of this eroding house, how much deposition has taken place. I think that most of these houses ... This is the remnants of another house eroding out here. This site probably dates no earlier than 400-500 years old, so there's still quite a bit of eolian deposition and now erosion in this region over just the past 400-500 years. In this case we found sled runners in addition to some other artifacts eroding out of the house.
One of the Park Service staff was in the field with us and he'd grown up in this region. He remembered coming to this place as a boy. This dune is particularly high and there's a pond next to it, so people would come and gather fresh water. It's a place that a lot of people know, including Albert, who was in the field with us. He commented on how much erosion had taken place just in his lifetime. It was really great to have him in the field and have his long term, local perspective on the change that's been occurring here.
The other site assessment project that I've been working on with Rhea Hood has involved visiting northern Alaskan National Historic Landmarks and conducting those same site assessments and testing this standardized field methodology for recording site vulnerability to climate change. In this project we've had a chance to meet with more communities and talk about their concerns and their ideas for mitigation in relationship to climate change and other impacts to National Historic Landmarks. It's been really great to have more time for that aspect of the project and work at the National Historic Landmarks.
A couple more examples of impacts to sites in this region. The Wales National Historic Landmark, this is an old excavation unit, that's why there are blue tarps here. There's quite a bit of water ponding and erosion occurring. There's also coastal erosion on the right that you can see at the base of the archeological site. It could really undercut the site and cause erosion.
This is also at the Wales National Historic Landmark. The other thing that's happening here is there's quite a bit of subsistence digging going on at the site, and I do want to mention that the community has protected the vast majority of the NHL from the subsistence digging, but this is one area of the site where it is happening. I've wondered, I've mentioned before, we'll see an increase in subsistence digging and illegal digging or collecting in some places because of increased visibility due to erosion.
For example, at Ipiutak National Historic Landmark on the right, I know it's a little bit hard to see in this picture, but this is an archeological site. These slump blocks contain archeological deposits and they've been eroded and then left behind during the process of fall storms when the ice is starting to build up and it pushes the ice up onto the shore, then the water goes out and the slump blocks are left behind. I did see some digging and probably collecting going on in this disturbed area. I'm wondering if we'll see more of that in the future. Of course, this is already in a disturbed area of the site, but it's another impact related to climate change erosion.
We're doing the infield assessments. We'll be doing a few more this coming summer. The other part of this is thinking about how do you prioritize sites for protection. What we've been talking about in these projects is drawing on existing NPS data, so things from the ASMIS database, or NRHP significance statements, taking the results from assessments, community meetings and trying to rank sites. The risk to climate change impacts, and then to make some decision about which ones to work on, more in the future.
We're taking into account climate change hazards, climate change vulnerability, other hazards to site conditions, other things we notice like subsistence digging. The time frame for those hazards? Are we looking at climate change impacts that are happening now to sites or projected for ten years, twenty years, thirty years from now. Current site condition and then site significance, which we all know is a combination of a lot of different factors. What do archeologists think, what do communities think, what do people who worked at the site before think about site significance. I put it into a matrix similar to this one to rank sites on a large scale for mitigation. This part of the project we haven't actually done, we've just been talking about strategy for doing it.
What I'm talking about right now I'm very much in the middle of, I've just been thinking about where do we go next with it and one thing I've been thinking about, especially given how hard it is to actually get out in the field in some of the places where I work, and how much money it takes, and how that is a barrier to dealing with climate change impacts. I think there's a lot of opportunity to mine existing data sources in a prioritization process. I already mentioned ASMIS data, site significance data, state site records, remote imaging, in terms of the probability of there being sites that also have the potential for climate change impacts. I think there's a lot of work that can be done without going into the field, and that should be done to help in planning and prioritization.
One thing that I really was struck with in trying to come up with standardized site assessment methods was that a lot of this has to do with the site environment, the geologic setting. We really need to collaborate with colleagues in outsider disciplines, to create stronger models, essentially. We need geological and paleo-ecological data insights to better predict climate change impacts and to understand archeological site vulnerability. We also need to get our colleagues on board with helping us come up with finer scale climate data or interpret their climate change data on a scale that means something to both past, present and to archeological sites.
I think, at least in the part of Alaska where I've been working, the only way to monitor climate change impacts is to collaborate with communities and to come up with some kind of community monitoring system, if people are interested in doing that. I think there is certainly potential there, at least in the communities that I visited. One thing that we definitely have to think about is that communities have a lot of other climate change-related concerns as well as other concerns, and that archeology may not be at the top of the list. I think a community monitoring system sounds great, but I'm not sure that's going to work everywhere. Then, when I look at the scale of the problem in Northwest Alaska, I don't think there's any way to deal with mitigation without a lot of collaboration and drawing people from communities, agencies, and universities in protecting the sites, just given the magnitude of what we can lose to climate change.
I think I'm actually going to stop there and just say thank you. These are a lot of people that I am working with now, or have funded some of the past research that I talked about. I'd be happy to take questions about any part of this project. I know I skipped over some details in the interest of covering a lot of ground. I'd be happy to answer questions.
Karen: Thank you, Shelby. There's a lot to think about here. Do people have questions or comments for her?
Well, I have a question. I'll start. Can you talk a little bit about why people would live on Cape Krusenstern to begin with? Especially, you know, that long strand that you showed us. What were the resources that were pulling them out there, and did they change over time?
Shelby: Marine mammals and fish, and then, seasonally, birds as well, probably. One of the hypothesis about what's been driving settlement pattern change in that region is perhaps changing sea mammal migration patterns, or sea mammal abundance. There may have been periods of time when seals were easily accessible from the cape so lots of people were going and living there. Then time periods when the seals went away and people either didn't live at the cape or shifted to other resources. We were expecting to see more shifting in our settlement pattern, more increases and decreases in our settlement pattern data with that idea in mind. It doesn't look like it's happening exactly that way.
Karen: Thank you. You've done a really good job of demonstrating how important it is to understand the erosion patterns in order to interpret your settlement changes over time. I was really surprised, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it seems clear that there's a connection between the amount of looting that's going on and the amount of wind erosion.
Shelby: Yeah, and I always feel a little bit nervous talking about it because I don't know in some cases. Clearly people are digging in some of those sites, and it's been going on for some time, but it seems to be increasing in some areas. I know I have other colleagues at the BLM, for example, who are trying to understand the scale of that problem, but I'm just seeing it on a site by site basis. I can see that sites are becoming more obvious through coastal erosion, for example. If people are out on the land there are more opportunities to just pick things up.
Karen: Is there a big market, still, for artifacts and cultural objects as there was maybe twenty years ago? I remember when cell phones first came in with picture-taking capabilities and the market just went right through the roof.
Shelby: I guess I'm not sure. I don't have data on how it compares. I do know that you can look on eBay or some auction houses are selling things that are clearly from Northwest Alaska. It's definitely happening. I think there is some economic driver to collect and then sell artifacts. Some of it could just be hobby collecting too.
Karen: Thanks for that. I was also really interested in the modeling that you’re doing for prioritizing site mitigation efforts and site preservation efforts. Have you gotten any interest from the Park Service to try this in other areas?
Shelby: I think there is some... I'm not the only person that is thinking about this and I know that there are folks in the Pacific Northwest and in Alaska region I think have been trying to come up with sort of a prioritization matrix and there have been a couple of different models. I guess I see myself in being involved in that larger effort, and maybe doing field testing. I think it's possible that some at least of what we've been doing with the National Historic Landmarks might get used more broadly, that's the idea anyways. That would be exciting. I think that you'd have to think specifically according to what region you're in, in terms of what climate change impacts and what kind of sites do I have. You'd have to add some things to the forms and the strategy that I developed, since Northern Alaska is kind of a unique situation. My idea is that it could be generalized and I think that's what the Parks Service wants as well. That's what I've been working with is the regional office.
Karen: Marcy Rockman is our national climate change, our cultural resources, climate change coordinator. She's going to talk later on in this series. I certainly hope that she's aware of the work that you've been doing. I think she'd be really interested in it.
Shelby: I think so. I am looking forward to her talk and she and I have been trying to get together in person. Hopefully we'll be able to do that at the Society for American Archaeology meetings.
Karen: Oh, very good.
Shelby: Yeah.
Jennifer: Shelby, I have a question. This is Jennifer Peterson from the regional office in Anchorage.
Shelby: Hi, Jennifer.
Jennifer: Hi. I have a question about the work that you've done on the coastal sites and the drop in the number of coastal sites in the last five hundred years. I think you mentioned something about looking at the interior and seeing if there's maybe some migration or more settlement in the interior at that time. How does that work with your ceramic work? Have you seen a lot of, during the last five hundred years, trading between the two areas?
Shelby: Yeah. There is movement of ceramics between those two regions during that time period, for sure. What I saw was if I looked at the use of sources, before five hundred years ago and after five hundred years ago, at the same site, it was different. That suggested to me that people were either procuring clay from different places or obtaining ceramics from different places. They still had networks, but the geography of their network had changed. Does that make sense?
Jennifer: Yes. Thanks.
Shelby: And I also looked at the settlement data. I collected radiocarbon dates. I showed you the ones from Cape Krusenstern. I've been collecting in a database, ones for the whole region and also mining the gray literature to try and broaden that settlement study. I have wondered if ... It's not clear to me yet but it is possible that there's an increase in interior population during that time period, possibly some movement away from the coast into the interior.
One idea is that people stopped focusing on marine resources because they, or decreased their focus on marine resources, I should say, because they became less available and focused more on fishing. That's a hypothesis that I'm definitely interested in investigating, if I can get out onto some of those inferior rivers and do some more work.
Description
Shelby Anderson, 11/20/2014, ArcheoThursday
Duration
57 minutes, 24 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
11/20/2014
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