Under the direction of Dr. Kent Lightfoot, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Aron Crowell will conduct archaeological fieldwork and analysis to collect data for his doctoral dissertation. Mr. Crowell will conduct a two year program of investigation at the site of Three Saints Bay located on Kodiak Island, Alaska. A village at this site was established in 1784 by Grigorii Shelikhov as a fur trade outpost and constituted the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska. The goals of the settlement were to pacify the local Koniag Indians, to use them to exploit the untapped sea otter resources in the region, and to establish a permanent, largely self-sustaining outpost for the organization and administration of fur procurement. The Russians succeeded, at least temporarily, and the site was not abandoned until the early to mid-nineteenth century. Mr. Crowell and his colleagues will conduct a remote sensing survey of the site to locate structural remains and then excavate a series of houses. Through recovery and analysis of artifactual and faunal remains, they will attempt to reconstruct settlers' lifeways and their relations with local inhabitants. The team will also excavate in the associated Koniag Indian village to determine the effect of the immigrants. This contact situation is extremely interesting because interactions between native Americans and European/Asian settlers and merchants were extremely variable, and the Kodiak case illustrates a rare situation of direct dominance and economic exploitation. This research is important for several reasons. It will increase our understanding of the processes of culture contact and change. It will also help to fill in a blank in the record of North American colonization, and, finally, it will assist in the training of an extremely promising young scientist.
