<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">The Nunalleq dig site near Quinhagak, now in its 15th year since excavation began, is seen on Aug. 3, 2024. (Gabby Salgado/KYUK)</figcaption></figure>



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A short distance from a crumbling shoreline littered with sandbags in August, a group of volunteer archaeologists scraped and sifted soil from an 8-meter-long rectangle cut into the tundra on the Bering Sea coast.

Lead archaeologist Rick Knecht guided them as they used their trowels to trace the layers of a partially excavated room. It was once part of a massive subterranean sod house complex near modern-day Quinhagak, occupied beginning sometime in the late 16th century.

“That’s really good floor over here,” Knecht said, standing above the shallow pit. “It’d be nice to know where it goes. Maybe it just gets big, maybe just some huge room here.”

Today, at the site referred to as Nunalleq, or “old village” in the Yup’ik language, most of the sod house complex has been excavated. But the finds are still constant – what Knecht described as “one jaw-dropping museum piece per person, per day.”

Volunteer Michael Broderick held up a plastic tote containing kayak ribs, a caribou antler, and an uncarved seal tooth.

“This was all from 9:15 (a.m.) to noon. It’s unprecedented,” Broderick said. “And … these are called common finds, meaning that they’re so common that you would just put them in this box and no special care is taken for them.”

In another part of the pit, first-time Nunalleq volunteer Stephanie Harold opened her sketchbook to a drawing of a tiny, double hatch kayak she found a few days earlier. The artifact contradicts conventional wisdom that the vessel design was brought to Alaska by Russian sea otter hunters.

As a people of oral storytelling tradition, little was written about precontact Yup’ik history. Discoveries like the double hatch kayak serve to fill in that historical puzzle.

“The digging has been so compelling that I’m not stopping and sketching as much as I thought I would. I didn’t realize it’d be so interesting all the time,” Harold said.

But excavating these treasures is a battle against time. The last 15 years at Nunalleq have been a race against erosion, and Knecht said that the pace has only quickened in recent years.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Volunteer archaeologists excavate an 8-meter-long pit at the Nunalleq dig site on Aug. 1, 2024. (Gabby Salgado/KYUK)</figcaption></figure>

“With the groundwater running out from melting permafrost and kind of running down the beach, and then collapsing the sod root mass on top of it, it’s breaking off in these big piano-sized chunks onto the beach,” Knecht said.

The side room that volunteers have been working to excavate is out of reach of the crumbling shoreline, for now. Knecht said that this affords the project a rare chance to spend next summer’s season indoors with the artifacts.

“Right now we’ve got to catch up on the collections and analyzing all the stuff that we’re digging up,” Knecht said.

The stuff, more than 100,000 artifacts in total, make Nunalleq by far the largest preserved precontact Yup’ik site ever excavated.

“Sites are always bigger than you think, and in this case, way bigger than we thought,” Knecht said.

A voice in their own history

The entire collection of artifacts now lives at a tiny museum in the center of town called the Nunalleq Culture and Archaeology Center. It has given community members the chance to interact directly with their precontact heritage, and to be a part of writing the story.

Knecht said that without the willingness of Elders to share oral histories confirmed by the artifacts, the project would be years behind.

“This is a chance to have the story originate in the village,” Knecht said. “It’s hard for outsiders to conceive of not having a voice in your own history, but that’s what’s happened. So many artifacts get taken away. The story gets spun far away by strangers and inevitably, with lots of mistakes. But because they’re the authorities, they get listened to. It’s like chiseled in stone.”

The unprecedented discoveries at Nunalleq are in large part due to the tragic circumstances of its demise sometime between 1645 and 1675, during a period of widespread fighting across the region known as the Bow and Arrow Wars.

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