After our successful pilot survey around Old Harbor, the Seattle-based team flew back to Kodiak for a week of museum work at both the Alutiiq and Baranov Museums. We had several goals: 1) accessioning the few artifacts from the survey into the Alutiiq Museum’s collection, 2) studying artifacts and field notes at the Alutiiq Museum and 3) looking at historic maps and documents at the Baranov Museum.
To accession the artifacts, Hope, Hollis and Larissa scanned all the field notes that our team members had taken during the survey, transferred photos to the museum’s collections manager, washed the artifacts and glued tiny paper catalog numbers to them. Thankfully, we only had 4 small bags of artifacts!
Although Ben and Larissa had to catch a flight back to Seattle after just a couple days in Kodiak, Hollis and Hope stayed for another week to study museum collections. We started with the artifacts and notes from the University of Wisconsin’s Aleut/Konyag Project from the 1960s, which conducted excavations in Three Saints Bay, on southwestern Sitkalidak Island and at Kiavak (to the southwest of Three Saints Bay). These excavations laid some of the groundwork for archaeological interpretation of this region, however, the focus was not really on historic sites from the period of Russian occupation. These notes were helpful in learning the location and findings of previous excavations, including a small test done at the Three Saints Bay artel site, which we also surveyed this year. In addition to the Aleut/Konyag Project notes, we looked at collections from previous excavations at the Lighthouse Site and 1990s tests at Nunamiut, a cannery located in central Three Saints Bay.
During our afternoon at the Baranov Museum, we looked at some replicas of historic maps of Kodiak. One of the things I was looking for was more documentation of the supposed Ukshivik settlement in Barling Bay, which we had tried and failed to locate during our pilot survey. I originally encountered Ukshivik on a map from the Kodiak Island Borough, which listed the settlement as abandoned. A circa 1850 map in Sonja Luehrmann’s book Alutiiq Villages under Russian and U.S. Rule (2008) also has an odinochka (or small seasonal labor camp) in the same approximate location; however, when I asked a few folks from Old Harbor about it, they had not heard of such a site. It is a bit of a mystery!
At the Baranov Museum, I looked at a map drawn by Captain Illarion Arkhimandritov in 1849 and saw that there was a settlement in Barling Bay called Ukshivikak (approximated from pronunciation of Russian text) – not too different from Ukshivik. I cannot publicly post pictures of the map, but you can see some of the areas detailed in the caption above. So, these findings beg the question – why didn’t we find Ukshivik? The maps in Luehrmann’s book and at the museum were too zoomed out to determine the exact location of the settlement, so it is possible that the large site (KOD-551) we found to the north of Ukshivik’s expected location is the one mentioned on these maps. It is also possible that the settlement mapped in 1849 is closer to the mouth of the bay where other historic sites are known to be. We did not investigate those sites during our survey as they have been significantly eroded and we did not expect them to yield much data. I look forward to searching for other maps and reading ethnohistoric accounts of the region to see if there are more clues about the Ukshivik settlement and its residents!
Hollis K. Miller 