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A fragment of a mask that was preserved for hundreds of years in permafrost lies in the dirt at low tide in the community of Quinhagak in western Alaska. Wooden spoons, toys, fishing tackle and other artifacts were scattered, in some cases, for miles along the beach.
Yup’ik community near the edge of Bering Sea It was spared the widespread devastation wreaked by the remnants of Typhoon Halong on its neighbors to the west earlier this month. But it suffered a different kind of blow: High winds and storm surge destroyed dozens of feet of shoreline, disrupted a culturally important archaeological site and washed away potentially thousands of excavated artifacts.
About 1,000 pieces, including wooden masks and tools, were recovered at Quinhak after the storm struck parts of southwestern Alaska on October 11 and 12. But many more pieces – perhaps as many as 100,000 – were left scattered, said Rick Knecht, an archaeologist who has worked on the Nunalek, or Old Village, project for 17 years. This is approximately the number of fragments previously recovered from the archaeological site.
Meanwhile, freezing temperatures and snow have accumulated in the area, halting immediate efforts to find and recover more displaced artifacts, with searches conducted by four-wheel-drive vehicles and on foot.
Knecht called what happened a huge loss. The site has yielded the world’s largest collection of pre-contact Yup’ik artifacts. Much of what is known about Yup’ik life before the arrival of outsiders stems from the project, said Knecht, an emeritus senior lecturer in archeology at the University of Aberdeen. scotland,
He said, “When there are holes or glitches in the site, it’s like trying to read a book with holes in the pages. You’ll miss some things.” “And the bigger those holes are, the weaker the story. There are still some holes in the book.”
Although the name of the original village is not known, it was attacked and burned by another village around 1650, he said. Knecht has worked with elders and others in Quinhac to combine their traditional knowledge with the techniques and technologies used by archeology teams to study the past.
Quinhac has about 800 residents, and gathering subsistence food is extremely important to them.
Knecht said the storm scattered artifacts from the site long protected by permafrost. A long-standing concern, he said, is that climate change – thawing permafrost, coastal erosion, the potential for more frequent or stronger storms – poses a threat to the site.
This poses a risk to the community itself. Erosion threatens key infrastructure in Quinhac, including sewage lagoons, homes and fish camps. The thawing of permafrost is also destabilizing and weakening buildings, according to a 2024 report from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.
The excavation project began when artifacts began appearing on the beach around 2007. The part of the site that was washed away had already been excavated.
“There was a large section where we only went down about halfway and left it for later because we prioritized the parts of the site that were most at risk from sea erosion,” Knecht said.
When he left in July, there was about a 30-foot buffer in the ocean. The storm took out the buffer and 30 feet of the site, he said. It also left what Knecht described as piano-sized clumps of tundra on the tidal flats.
At first Knecht did not recognize the site after Halong.
He said, “I just walked by it because the beach and the sights on the site that I was used to had all disappeared or changed.”
Work Preserving the rescued artifacts involves soaking the wood with sea salt and placing the pieces in special chemicals that will help hold them together when dried, he said. If one were to take one of the wooden artifacts from the beach and let them dry, they would “fall to pieces, sometimes within a matter of hours.”
The museum in Quinhac has a laboratory where the artifacts are kept.
archaeologist The hope is to return to the site next spring for “salvage excavation” of layers exposed by the storm, he said. In some ways, it feels like when teams visited the site in 2009: “We’ve got this raw site with artifacts emerging all over the place,” he said. “So we’re starting from scratch again.”