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.
“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.
According to Yup’ik oral histories, the sod house complex at Nunalleq was torched and its inhabitants murdered in retribution for a failed raid on another village. After the attack, the site was quickly abandoned. For this reason, archaeologists have found all of the implements of daily life, as well as the remains of the site’s last occupants intact, preserved in permafrost over the centuries.
Knecht said that the success of Nunalleq has been bittersweet because it highlights the scale of precontact history at risk across the state as tens of thousands of miles of coastline and riverbanks shift, change, and erode.
“I’m not so worried about this project as I am all the other sites in Alaska that aren’t getting this kind of attention,” Knecht said. “There are hundreds, maybe thousands of sites calving off into the water right now.”
Knecht said that the level of support from the local village corporation, Qanirtuuq Inc., and the large pool of volunteers from around the globe make Nunalleq uniquely situated. But he also said that these types of projects can be done affordably, and encouraged people to come see the collection in Quinhagak with their own eyes.
“If somebody wants to do a project like this, we can support them from here. We can help them through the conservation process and show them how a museum works,” Knecht said. “We could even hold collections while they get started and help train people. We’re very willing to do that, eager to do that.”
For Knecht, the story of precontact Yup’ik people itself, and their place in collective global heritage, is at stake.
“By working together, I think we can save this stuff, and someday, if we don’t, people are going to ask why we didn’t,” Knecht said.
In 2025, the Nunalleq team plans to briefly hang up their trowels and catch up on cataloging. But elsewhere in Alaska, the clock is ticking for the digging to commence.
Soon enough, more people than ever may have the chance to see first-hand what community-based archaeology can accomplish. This is because Knecht said that the Nunalleq project is currently applying for a grant in partnership with the Anchorage Museum to take a portion of the artifacts on tour across Alaska, and potentially the world.
You can explore and learn about the artifacts virtually by visiting the Nunalleq Digital Museum.
