Trowel-ing Against Climate Change: Part 2
The power of Nunalleq's narrative
Nunalleq, the world’s largest preserved pre-contact Yu’pik site ever excavated, is immediately threatened by climate change. Read part one or continue below with my July 2024 experience digging and sketching there.
From the Nunalleq dig site, the village of Quinhagak blended into the flat landscape. Even the iconic white crosses at the nearby Moravian cemetery blurred away. However, the crosses were a constant reminder of the climate change crisis that propelled the dig — as they shifted in the melting permafrost, they leaned together and tilted apart with unstable camaraderie.
“We always knew there was a site here,” Warren Jones, CEO of the local ANCSA corporation, explained to me on the way into town from the airstrip. “The elders would always say, don’t touch those sites, don’t disturb them.” Jones finally convinced the elders to allow excavation, but ”not for money making . . . for our future generations.”* In fact, Qanirtuuq Inc., affectionately known at Q-Corp, bankrolled the first few years of the project.
Warren’s three sentences encapsulate the power of Nunalleq’s narrative: a climate-change story involving violence, oral history, and now — after cultural loss — reconnection.
Warren summarized the story that kicked off the project: another village from somewhere further north attacked this one, burned it to coals, and killed everyone. No one ever lived on the site again. Over 350 years later, their descendents living in Quinhagak, just one river-mouth north, noticed artifacts on the beach below the site.
Within 24 hours of digging, my fellow diggers (three undergraduate archeology students on their mandatory field experience) had added additional details: warriors from Nunalleq had gone out on a raiding party, but the target community got wind of the plan and instead ambushed and destroyed the mauraders. That village then sent out an attack party who retaliated with a level of violence unprecedented even in those turbulent times: throwing burning oil lamps into the structures to smoke the people out, tying up victims with grass ropes and shooting them full of stone arrows, even killing the dogs.**
Richard Knecht, the project’s lead archeologist and emeritus professor of archeology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, always directed the retelling away from the intriguing gruesomeness of the attack. Yes, it’s a fascinating story — but for him, that’s not the real story. He believes the attack was one of many inter-village battles that occurred during the 200 year period when Nunalleq was occupied, described in oral history as the time of the Bow and Arrow Wars. “No matter what people say, wars are always about taking something from someone else,” said Rick.
This was the time of the Little Ice Age, a worldwide climate change event that generated much western cultural lore and history. Beginning around 1300, a fifty-year episode of atmospheric dust generated by four gigantic volcanic eruptions caused a feedback loop between the ocean and new sea ice, which kept global temperatures low into the 1800’s. The Little Ice Age made the winters rough on the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock and later iced up the Delaware River when George Washington needed to cross it. It has been credited with famines forcing people to abandon their children (Hansel and Gretel) and various European wars including the French Revolution.***
Carbon dating suggests that Nunalleq was “inhabited . . . steadily from roughly 1450 until the massacre in the mid-1600’s.” At the time, the village faced a protective sand spit created by the Arolik River, a name derived from the Yu’pik word for “ashes,” which perhaps refers to the village’s destruction by fire. Using nets, the residents had a predictable supply of salmon as well as abundant seal and caribou. This meant a less migratory lifestyle than their Inuit cousins farther north. This spot was so intensively used because it was one of the few places to build in this marshy landscape. **
However, the Little Ice Age put “pressure on trade exchange and hunting territories” which led to “changes in subsistence menu,” said Rick Knecht, “climate change happens too fast for people to adapt and this leads to conflict.”
* * *
This fall, I returned to the rainforest embrace of my home in Hoonah, a small community in the “banana belt “ of Southeast Alaska. Like many Americans, I lived on edge, drawn to the news as it were the salty, sugary, fat-filled foods that had tasted so good in Quinhagak. I braced against perceived threats: An autocratic climate change denier appeared likely to win the presidency. Thousands died in new wars in Ukraine and near Israel. Hurricanes flooded previous safe havens. Leaders — and citizens — busted political norms. And so on.
Just like at Nunalleq during the Bow and Arrow Wars?
Is the worldwide increase in conflict and right-wing politics due to inevitable cycles in human nature? Or . . . is climate change contributing to our international distress, to the feeling that nothing is safe? Even if you don’t acknowledge the anthropogenic causes, even if you try to avoid the news, you know our world is no longer predictable, and traditional systems appear to be collapsing. And the scientific consensus makes a terrifying refrain: climate change is an existential crisis.
Or can I find a broader perspective?
In the last 15 years, Rick has collaborated with Q Corp and the villagers to rescue over 100,000 artifacts — and in contradiction of academic tradition, build a museum to house them right in the village rather than at some faraway university. As a result, cultural traditions that were largely lost in the 1800’s to Moravian missionaries are returning. Unbelievably, the pressures of climate change have facilitated a cultural resurrection; now the villagers have dance masks and countless tool types as models to create modern versions. Warren Jones wasn’t kidding when he said that this project was about the future.
Galvanized by dig project, Q Corp has also created a subsidiary, Nalaquq, “to repurpose technology and expertise from the archaeology project.” Nalaquq’s goal is to provide shareholder training and employment in other sectors, for example, resource management and search and rescue operations.****
In the vast trove of artifacts and the layout of the sod house, Rick also sees signs of a cultural florescence during the colder era — especially in terms of the house construction and ceremonial practices. People work best under pressure, he says; “when the chips are down, people figure out how to survive.”*
Perhaps that applies to us all?
*Welcome to Nunalleq: stories from the village of our ancestors (short films by Dr. Alice Watterson)
**Archaeology Magazine: Cultural Revival
***Pre-contact adaptations to the Little Ice Age
**** Anchorage Daily News: Archaeology project is about the future as much as the past
UPCOMING: Part 3 on Feb. 4, 2025
ABOUT THE ART
All the images in this post are Stillman & Birn Alpha sketchbook pages or from two foldout 8” x 30” pieces of Fabriano Cold Press watercolor paper. I use the latter because it handles pen detail so well.
I appreciate the wider context. "War is always about taking," and the stresses of rapid climate change driving violence.
Just like being there! Or, I should say "enhances being there!".