UW News

June 15, 1998

Undergraduates will head for Alaska to dig into North America’s past

Neither isolation, a chance encounter with a giant Kodiak brown bear or dismal weather marked by long periods of non-stop rain or drizzle is expected to dampen the enthusiasm of 15 budding archaeologists who will spend their summer digging into North America’s past.

The undergraduate students have been selected to participate in the University of Washington’s summer anthropology field camp on Sitkalidak Island in Alaska’s Kodiak Archipelago. The camp runs from June 22 to Aug. 5.

The camp is a training ground for new archaeologists and will be directed by Ben Fitzhugh, UW assistant professor of anthropology, and three graduate students. Fitzhugh has worked on Sitkalidak Island every year since 1992 and in remote arctic and subarctic research locations since 1985.

“This camp will provide an unparalleled hands-on learning experience,” says Fitzhugh. “Not only will the students learn archaeology by doing primary research, but this is a project involving many other skills including local cultural history, geology, natural history, ecology and cultural anthropology.”
The site that Fitzhugh and his students will excavate is called Tanginak Springs and has been the home of hunters, fishermen and gatherers for the past 7,000 to 7,500 years. It is one of the oldest known sites in the Kodiak Archipelago and is about 250 miles southwest of Anchorage. Sitkalidak Island presently is uninhabited and the closest village, Old Harbor, is about 1? hours away by fishing boat.

From previous work, Fitzhugh knows the Tanginak Spring Site has five floors, or layers of occupation. He hopes the students will be able to uncover the top two layers this summer and determine whether the early inhabitants lived in tents or earth houses. Other goals are to gather data on environmental conditions site when people lived at the site and to collect artifacts that may enable researchers to identify possible technological evolution during site occupation.


For additional information contact Fitzhugh at (206) 543-9604 or 543-5240 through June 12. He can be reached in Kodiak June 15-17 at (907) 486-2634 or 486-7004 and with difficulty June 18-24 in Old Harbor at (907) 286-2241.
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