Alaska Storm Scatters Ancient Yup’ik Artifacts as Archaeologists Race to Save Nunalleq Site

In Quinhagak, the storm shook houses and damaged buildings and infrastructure. The day after it hit, Jenny Matthew and her husband rode four-wheelers along the torn-up beach to assess the damage. Wind and floodwaters had peeled the tundra up like discarded carpeting. As Matthew scanned the debris, something caught her eye.

“I said to my husband, ‘Look, what’s that?’ We stopped. He got up and took it, and it was that bowl,” Matthew said. The bowl was wooden and smooth. According to archaeologists, it was carved by Quinhagak residents somewhere between 400 and 600 years ago and was one of thousands of cultural objects scattered along the coastline.

The storm had unearthed the bowl from Nunalleq, a dig site near the village. The site is known as one of the best examples of Alaska Native Yup’ik culture before Western contact and is an important link to Quinhagak’s past. The storm not only scattered many objects from the site but also increased risks for what was still in the ground by eroding the land buffer between the Bering Sea and the buried artifacts.

This past summer, a team of archaeologists came to the village for an emergency dig to recover as much as possible before the next big storm. Lead archaeologist Rick Knecht said archaeologists have been working at the site since 2009. After thawing permafrost revealed significant numbers of objects in the early 2000s, the village deliberated and decided to try to save the pieces of its culture. The objects include hand-carved animals, grass rope, sewing needles, ornate wooden masks and pieces of kayaks. According to the archaeologists, frozen ground has helped preserve artifacts made of organic material that would likely have eroded under different conditions.

Knecht said the team is mostly made up of volunteers and has a shoestring budget, with funding from the Pacific Northwest Archaeological Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution, among others. The whole archaeological site is about the size of two Olympic-size pools, but the emergency dig area is smaller, about the size of a backyard pool. It is a hole dug around the buried remnants of several sod houses that date back 400 to 500 years.

Charlotta Hillerdal, who has been part of the excavation for more than 15 years, was home in Scotland when she heard about the storm damage. “I was crying,” Hillerdal said. “It was a horrible feeling.” Knecht said that since the dig began, they have watched the Bering Sea creep closer to the site. Shorelines in that part of Alaska are now more vulnerable to erosion because of decreasing sea ice and permafrost thaw, both driven by human-caused climate change.

Last October’s storm closed the distance further. At some high tides, seawater can now reach into the pit. “It’s every bit as tough as working in front of bulldozers,” Knecht said. In October, the flooding was so extensive that the site was covered by feet of water. When it receded, it took many valuable objects with it. The team worries that could happen again.

Knecht said they hope to return to the site next summer, though they are still raising money to do so through a GoFundMe campaign and Quinhagak Heritage Inc., the nonprofit that oversees the dig. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave this for the waves,” Knecht said. “It’s like you might as well take those pieces of artwork we’re finding and skip it off into the Bering Sea.”

At the Nunalleq Culture and Archaeology Center, a museum-style building and lab, the pieces of Quinhagak’s past are available to their direct descendants as well as the public. Elizabeth Church, director of Quinhagak Heritage Inc., which manages the center and the dig, said seeing the artifacts on the beach was traumatic. She said it underscored the community’s desire to steward their ancestors’ belongings.

“They are interwoven into us as people, and we feel a great sense of responsibility to care for them well, and to take them into the future with us,” Church said. She said the artifacts also show evidence of people adapting to environmental change and making technological progress. “When you know that you come from a people that were so resilient and so capable and so talented and so smart — you get a boost,” Church said. “It’s amazing.”