The first artifact — a wooden mask — was discovered in 2007 by a child who stumbled upon it while playing on the beach near his home in Quinhagak, western Alaska.
Over the following months, hundreds of similar objects — baskets, finely carved harpoon shafts, lip plugs, wooden dolls, ivory tattoo needles — emerged from the earth as melting permafrost and erosion driven by climate change revealed a Yupik Eskimo settlement dating to the 1600s.
More than a decade after the first find, an extraordinary collection of about 100,000 prehistoric Yupik artifacts — the largest such collection in the world — sits in a small newly opened museum in Quinhagak, home to an indigenous community of about 700 people.
Photo: AFP
“This is by far the highlight of everything I’ve ever excavated in my 40-year career — and I’ve worked on some pretty spectacular sites,” said Rick Knecht, an archeologist with the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.
For the past 10 years Knecht has led a team racing to save as many items as possible at the excavation site about 4.8km from Quinhagak called Nunalleq, which means Old Village in the Yupik language.
“Almost everything we know about Yupik prehistory comes from this site,” Knecht said. “If we’d lost it, the people here would have lost their past and a tangible link to that past, which would have been an unbelievable tragedy.”
While Knecht marvels at the trove of artifacts, he is also horrified that similar sites across Alaska are probably disappearing as the frozen ground that has preserved them for centuries thaws and erosion sweeps them away.
“As the permafrost melts, you can see that the soil liquefies. It’s like a box of ice cream,” Knecht said, pointing to the gooey mud along the fast-eroding shoreline in Quinhagak and large clumps of earth ready to topple into the sea.
“We’ve only saved this one site, but tens of thousands like it are being lost right now while we’re talking because of climate change,” he said.
Based on carbon dating of organic material at Nunalleq, experts believe the site dates to a time historians call the Bow and Arrow Wars, when Yupik communities were engaged in fierce warfare and before Russian explorers discovered Alaska in the early 1800s.
However, getting village elders who believe ancestral sites should not be disturbed to agree was no easy task.
“It took [village leader] Warren Jones two years to talk the village, person by person, into allowing an archeological project,” Knecht said. “They thought long and hard about it and some of the elders who were reluctant are now our strongest supporters.”
Many village residents now volunteer every summer to join Knecht and his crew of archeologists and students as they sift through the earth to save what they can.
“You get this terrible feeling of working against time and you realize the full scope of the cultural tragedy that is part of climate change,” Knecht said. “It’s grim, it really is grim. It’s a horror show.
However, one positive side effect has been renewed interest among the Yupik people in the practices and traditions of their ancestors.
A number of villagers are carving replicas of the artifacts found at Nunalleq, students at the local school have set up a traditional dance troupe and many have started to learn the Yupik language.
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