Remnants of 7,000-Year-Old Village Discovered on Alaskan Island
An important discovery was made on the remote Alaskan island of Shuyak, 54 air miles north of the Kodiak Archipelago.
Artifacts dating back 7,000 years were discovered at the site. The island has served as a hotspot for archeological activity since the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in 1989, local outlet Alaska's News Source reported.
'We didn't know that we were going to find a site over 7,000 years old, which is, it's always very exciting," Director of Archaeology for the Alutiiq Museum, Molly Odell, told the outlet. "The site had partially eroded, and so there were artifacts, stone tools, on the beach.'
The team of researchers also located evidence of a small 300-year-old village believed to have once been home to nearly 300 people.
The Alutiiq-Sugpiaq people, who are indigenous to Alaska, have inhabited the area surrounding the archipelago for approximately 7,500 years, according to Alaska Public Media. The word Suu'aq (Shuyak) in Alutiiq translates to "rising out of the water."
"I think we found that one village that had 11 house pits, probably had two to three hundred people living in it, you know, 300 years ago," Patrick Saltonstall, the archaeology curator with the Alutiiq Museum, told the outlet. "Shuyak has always sort of been a place where I think it seems like there were fewer people up there. But finding that, you know what your preconceptions are and what you actually find often don't match."
Shuyak Island played a significant role in Alaska's history, in particular, due to at least two established Alutiiq villages. Russian fur trader Gregorii Shelikov destroyed one of the villages — and by the late 1700s, there were no communities left on the island, the outlet reported.
The island was later home to a herring saltery and family fishing operations providing food for human consumption and animal feed for a "growing fox farming industry" in the 1920s. The Sklaroff & Sons smoked fish establishment from 1892, in Port William on the south end of Shuyak Island, was turned into a fish processing facility or cannery, which was operated by the Washington Fish and Oyster Company until 1976.
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Following the 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, parts of the island's archaeological sites were at risk of erosion. The new discoveries have indicated that this threat is less prevalent.
"What we found up there is that's not happening anymore. All the sites are much more stable," Saltonstall told Alaska Public Media. "You see grass growing on all the beaches, and it demonstrates…the land sank in 1964 and it's rebounded ever since, and it's outpacing sea level rise up there."
The museum is doing survey work in partnership with the Shuyak Island State Park and Alaska State Parks system. The museum plans to update the archaeology display at the Big Bay Ranger station on the island to reflect the new artifacts discovered on the island, according to the outlet.
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