Some finds
Leather belt fragment
Wooden artifacts
Toy horse
New Runic Inscriptions
Socio-ecological systems
LTERs and
process studies
Sea Ice extent reduced
Why archaeology?
Longue dureé—deep time
Multiple (relatively) independent cases
We know how the story ends
Implies a long period of success
Simulated ground temperatures at 1 meter depth for Alaska for the periods 2000-09 (above) and 2090-99 (below)
2000-2009
2000-2009
2090-2099
2090-2099
Simulated active layer depth for Alaska for the periods 2000-09 (above) and 2090-99 (below)
Point Hope
Point Hope
Kivalina
Kivalina
Point Hope
Kivalina
Kivalina
Point Hope
It is projected that communities of Point Hope and Kivalina will lose their permafrost by 2100
Scales of Unpredictability through Time
IPCC 2001
Centennial=
LTK+Oral
histories
Millennial =
Oral History or
A wing and prayer
Sub-Annual =
local adaptive
mechanism
Decadal=
Partnerships
Walakpa--July 2013
September 2014
Cultural Knowledge:
From Black Box to Tool Kit
Local and traditional knowledge (LTK) as resource.
How to collect, mobilize, and assess?
Long term records (archaeology/ paleoecology)
Sustainability of what, for how long, at what cost, and for whom?
Creating practical tool kits for future sustainability.
Rising Sea Level & Coastal Heritage
Worldwide Problem
Rising sea level and increasing storminess threaten sites from arctic to tropics. Not all sites can be rescued or conserved, but expertise exists in site protection and rapid rescue. Need for international collaboration in priorities and joint action.
Coastal defenses at Skara Brae Orkney UNESCO W orld Heritage Site endure for 80 years
Eroding Archaic 5,000 BP shell midden Barbuda
Permafrost and sea level rise at Birnirk
Our Library is on Fire NOW
Looking Back to Look Forward
Uses information about past ecosystems for the strategic management of future ecosystems
Reverse the 'shifting baseline' syndrome by broadening the understanding of ecosystem dynamics across time
Pitcher et al. (2005)
An Ipiutak egg
Not just culture--
Basic zooarch data
Stable isotopes
aDNA
Steroids
Trace elements
Big data
Ecosystem reconstruction and change
Climate/habitat reconstruction
Extinctions & bottlenecks
Species response to specific types of change
OVER MILLENIA
Sites as nodes in
Distributed Observing Networks of the Past
(DONOP)
Today:
Researchers collect samples from land & sea
Samples are returned to a home base (museum or lab)
Samples are curated and remain available for study
In the past:
People hunted and gathered animals and plants from land and sea
Items were returned to a home base (archaeological site)
Parts of those were discarded and remain available for study
Different goals, similar outcomes
Sites as nodes in a Long-Term Ecological Observing Network
Differing trajectories of Atlantic cod vs. Pacific Cod under different fishing regimes (CODSTORY & Sanak Biocomplexity Project)
Eider conservation on a millennial scale and LTK in Iceland (Hicks et al. 2014)
WALRUS--Walrus Adaptability and Long-term Responses: Using multi-proxy data to project Sustainability (aDNA,C14, stable isotopes, steroids, morphology)
Pre-contact fish use in the Barrow area
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Socio-ecological systems
Archaeological sites
Sanak Island Food Webs
Credit: Jennifer Dunne
Image courtesy Herbert D.G. Maschner
Archaeology and Egg shell Identification
Massive concentrations of egg shells are found in Mývatn archaeological sites dating to first settlement (c.875 AD)
Electron Microscope analysis of excavated bird egg shell proves that most eggs came from ducks
Kesara Anamthawat Jónsson, Arni Einarsson & Megan Hicks expand the story: large collections and deep stratigraphy, sp. Level ID.
Modern and recent historic sustainable management of waterfowl in Mývatn extends back to first settlement- over 1100 years! Local TEK on the millennial scale, bioscience, archaeology, ethnography, and local ecological knowledge combine synergistically.
BIS
APL
MSE
APE
Jet & Ivory composite labret
and fish bones
Stanford Map
Stanford in shown in black, 2013 points in purple; 2014 in red
Images courtesy Mark Ahsoak Jr.
August 2015
What do we do about it? Scotland's Coastal Heritage at Risk
FACEBOOK
Scotland's Coastal Heritage at Risk
October 6 ·
We've had a fantastic weekend surveying the Newshot ship graveyard - thanks so much to everyone who came along. We'll be posting a blog soon to detail what we've discovered about the history of the boats.
In Scotland, thousands of sites are threatened by erosion, and the SCAPE Trust has been working with Government Agency, Historic Scotland, to prioritise action at sites and promote collaborative working with communities around the entire coast. The public are encouraged to correct and update data using an interactive website and mobile apps, and they nominate locally-valued sites for projects.
https://twitter.com/CoastArch
https://www.facebook.com/ScotlandsCoastalHeritageAtRisk
What do we do about it?
We need an Observing Network to identify & prioritize archives that are being lost.
More "boots on the ground"
Clearing house for information
We need Support to address most vulnerable sites in an interdisciplinary way
We need to Connect Nodes in the archaeological network with nodes in modern observing networks
Deeply stratified sites with organic preservation:
Not just for archaeologists anymore?
Or:
"distributed observing networks of the past"
Thanks to:
Vladimir Romanovsky, UAF
Owen Mason--Geoarch Alaska
Claire Alix--Sorbonne
Susan Lebo-- Hawai'I
2005-2014 NAP crews
2013 and 2015 WASP crews
Barrow Arctic Science Consortium
National Science Foundation (Office of Polar Programs)
Education through Cultural and Historical Organizations (ECHO)
North Slope Borough
UIC Science LLC
ARCUS—PolarTrec
Ilisaġvik College
North Slope Borough School District
Gufuskalar Iceland 15th c Fishing Booths and Winter 2014/15 storm damage
2014 End of season
2015 Start of season
Paleoecological Data from Archaeological Sites: A Rich Resource under Imminent Threat
Anne M. Jensen, Bryn Mawr College & University of Alaska Fairbanks
Ben Fitzhugh, University of Washington
Thomas McGovern, Hunter College and Graduate Center NYC, CUNY
Jørgen Hollesen, National Musuem of Denmark
James Woollett, Université Laval
Tom Dawson, University of Saint Andrews
Human Dimensions of the Arctic
AAOS Meeting
November4, 2015
Seattle
Melting middens and modern drainage ditches threaten organic preservation in the surviving stratified middens.
Approx. 200+ Dorset/Thule/Inuit winter sites in Labrador, each is a
probable source of data regarding local subsistence and ecology
in the past. Excellent site record spanning the MWP and LIA
-Relatively few large-scale excavations to date; some sites have yielded huge collections of well preserved animal bone, plant, insect and geoarchaeological data
-Excellent preservation and dating potential with the overlap of treeline and permafrost limits : frozen sites with dendrochronology, 14C
-Most sites are close to sea level and vulnerable to coastal erosion
-The most productive sites are threatened by permafrost melt (accelerated decay, destabilisation of soil column)
Collapse of soil column and shore edge slumping at Oakes Bay 1 HeCg-08 due to permafrost melting and shore erosion
Growth ring record of age and season of death in dentine of a ringed seal (winter kill)
Threats to Coastal Archaeology in Labrador
Dorset/Thule/Inuit winter village on 1 to
3m asl sand spit in Komaktorvik Fjord
Stratified midden at Uivak Point 1 HjCl-09: An archive of Inuit subsistence during the LIA
Project: The Archaeology of Inuit subsistence and landscape in Northern Labrador
PI : James Woollett Université Laval/Centre d'études nordiques
[email protected]
http://www.laboarcheologie.ulaval.ca/laboratoires/bioarcheologie/
Contact:
[email protected]
Contributions by:
Marcy Rockman
Cecilia Anderung,
Guðbjörg Ásta Ólafsdóttir
Ramona Harrison
Lilja Pálsdóttir
Francis Feeley
Megan Hicks,
Arni Einarsson
Kesara Anamthawat- Jonsson
Philippa Ascough
Gordon Cook
George Hambrecht
Kerry Sayle
Orri Vésteinsson,
Konrad Smiarowski
Mike Church
Seth Brewington
Vicki Szabo
Kristen M. Westfall
Ragnar Edvardsson
William P. Patterson
Snæbjörn Pálsson
Gardar/Igaliku Greenland
Midden Rescue 2012-13
In Greenland sites are endangered by both marine erosion and increased summer temperatures
"Melting middens"- Rapidly degrading organic preservation.
Bishop's Manor at Gardar. GHEA target for cooperative rescue by NKA, DK, CUNY, Arch. Inst. Iceland- drawing on IPY NABO experiences and resources.
where middens that once contained pristine bone now hold only bone mush...
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But it contains more than that. Aside from the nice labret, this slide shows many of the limited sample of fishbones from the Barrow area. From Ipiutak house at Nuvuk. Exposed and eroded within 2 months.
Materials from Greenland..
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LTK is often cited as important for sustainability, but there is considerable lack of clarity as to how to obtain and use it among non-social scientists. There is almost no discussion of the ethical issues in doing so, which are also important.
Sustainability is also poorly defined and analyzed, particularly the time dimension of sustainability. Is something that works for two or three years really sustainable?
Archaeology can help with these problems.
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and Iceland.
During last winter, Iceland had many bad storms and Gufuskálar was hit very badly so entire rooms disappeared from what we had left to excavate.
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The foregoing discussion focuses on social and spatial scales of information acquisition and transmission. To more fully explore the importance of information strategies to people in small scale societies, we need to also consider the temporal scale of environmental variation and how different information strategies might serve to minimize people's exposure to hardship at different scales.
For the purposes of this discussion we focus on environmental unpredictability in subsistence access. Uncertainty is commonly defined as a measure of unpredictability about a future outcome based on lack of information, while risk is defined as a measure of the variance in outcomes for which no amount of additional information will narrow down the degree of unpredictability (Knight REF, REFS). Logically then, information acquisition and storage strategies enable people to reduce unpredictability related to uncertainty, and in the process gain a better understanding of the nature of risks they face.
Frequency and amplitude of environmental variability tends to be inversely correlated with high frequency variability tending towards lower amplitude variation compared to lower frequency cycles. By way of illustration, consider proxy data for climate variability recorded for global temperature in the last 18 years as shown in Figure ____a (globally averaged: REF). Seasonal and inter-annual fluctuations are of lower amplitude than decadal cycles. Looking at ice-core estimates of climate change over the last 1000 years (IPCC 2001) , we see further that, on average, decadal cycles, are lower in amplitude than centennial cycles.
Given this well documented pattern, we can now link the spatial scale of environmental information strategies to the temporal patterns of environmental variability. To do this we need to observe that temporal variability has a generally predictable relationship to spatial variability, such that larger amplitude fluctuations tend to have the largest spatial "footprint", requiring larger scale spatial information networks to mitigate. Local information networks and direct observation will be most effective for dealing with relatively common, low amplitude shifts in resource productivity, diversity, and distribution, as these networks allow for the most frequent updating of information and the greatest flow of information about local conditions and options. Macro-band scale networks such as hxaro partnerships would be less effective for dealing with high frequency variability, both because of the reduced frequency of interaction and the higher cost of network maintenance. These networks would instead help to distribute information about decadal scale variability that might require temporary adjustments or even re-organization of populations into new groups at the regional scale. Such adjustments could extend to somewhat broader scales (though often with increased inter-group conflict) by means of information collected through "walk-abouts", and indirect information transfers over greater distances (facilitated by specialized traders and/or down the line social transmission). The ability to anticipate and deal effectively with high amplitude centennial or longer scale fluctuations is limited to strategies for preserving information about ancient experiences preceding the lifespan of individuals preserved in traditional knowledge (oral history). People are most vulnerable to the longest scale, highest amplitude fluctuations, for which prior experience (if at all) is distant in time and for which relevant information has been transmitted through the greatest number of transmitters (leading to greater opportunity for erosion of accurate content). Millenial scale variability, such as the climate change currently affecting earth, approaches or exceeds the capacity of most (if not all) existing information strategies to predict. Extreme hardship, large scale migration, social displacement, and local extinction are predictable outcomes of the uncertainty surrounding environmental fluctuations at these longest time scales. It follows that vulnerability to environmental fluctuations decreases the longer a group remains in a region and accumulates local and traditional knowledge. With resiliency expanding from local to more regional scales and from shorter to longer scale cycles of variability with time.
Of course, archaeological sites contain our collective cultural heritage...
Ivory toggle or bag fastener from Nuvuk-1 burial. 975-1005 calAD.
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To look at slower variables, long paleoenvironmental records, like archaeological sites or ice or ocean cores, are essential.
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We have good ways to look at the faster variables, but there is more to the system than that.
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This is a problem across the Arctic, in Labrador...
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Photos taken after the last storm by Mark Ahsoak Jr.
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2013 was purple, the 2014 bluff was red. Roughly 11 m of retreat in one storm.
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Note the plastic sheeting sticking out of the profiles. That represents the bottom of Stanford's excavations.
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Once place where they are taking effective action with a citizen science model is Scotland. However, they have a much higher population density than does most of the Arctic.
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Greenland...
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One example
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Not only is the sea ice retreating, the ground is thawing. This makes it erode more quickly, but it also can become a positive feedback when bacterial and chemical action produce their own heat. This also contributes to decay of all the delicate organics preserved in frozen ground. Note these images were based on mid-range climate model output in 2009. They are probably optimistic.
Archaeological data has been used and is being used in addressing a number of questions which fall outside the traditional realm of social science. A few examples…
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This is what we stand to lose: rich records of invert and vert fauna, all their attendant isotopes and DNA, spanning thousands of years. This image is of the area where CS 2 was take from Walakpa in early August 2015, by a volunteer crew.
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Archaeological data can be used to look at food webs through time, and to evaluate models of past food webs.
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They can be used to supplement and parameterize LTK about parcticular species of interest for subsistence.
A big problem for resource managers is "shifting baselines." Managing using whatever baseline happened to result from when work was first funded in an area (even if that was a very unusual period) is not really a great idea.
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This is compounded by the retreat of sea ice in summer, increasing fetch and thus wave energy for fall storms, and forming later, increasing the period the coasts are unprotected.
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Apparently intact before it got crushed.
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From a large group of institutions.
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With contributions (images, discussion, encouragement) from many folks,
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