This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The proposed project, PI Anderson, will examine changing economic relations in northwestern Alaska over the past 3600 years.
This research project will investigate changing social and economic relationships in northwestern Alaska over the past 3500 years through the regional integration of archaeological, oral historic, and geological data sets. The research team will trace changes in networks of exchange among the peoples of northwest Alaska by mapping distributions of raw materials from source to the archaeological site and by collecting oral histories of social-economic exchange. It is hypothesized by the researchers that changes in economic and social relationships that are implied by the direction and flow of raw materials appear to have been, at least in part, due to changing local environmental conditions; environmental changes that brought different social groups together during their annual subsistence harvesting and materials procurement rounds. One of the more exciting aspects of the project will be teasing out the meaning of common exotics (raw materials such as cherts and slates that have an origin outside of the region) in ancient households. The archaeologist, working closely with oral histories, hope to shed light on issues such as trade, conflict, and the evolution of identity in northwestern Alaska.
Working on the assumption that annual subsistence rounds are closely tied to environmental conditions, any environmental or climatic change that favored one food-resource area over another could potentially require readjustments in the entire network of seasonal rounds and inter-group contacts in the region. To understand this web of relationships, this project incorporates four integrated research goals: 1)refining the regional chronological framework through the acquisition of new radiocarbon and tree ring dates, which will allow the research team to compare sites of the same age across the region; 2) archaeological excavation in one late prehistoric village site (on the Kobuk River) to complete the PI's sampling of northwestern Alaskan sites by sub-region and time period and to investigate differences in intensity of trade by family household; 3) obtaining an oral history of Kobuk River peoples that focuses on tales and recollections of inter-group contacts throughout the region; and 4)a geological component to identify source areas for the major raw materials, in particular slate, chert and to a certain extent obsidian, that were involved in exchange.
The oral history portion of the research project will also investigate local knowledge about climatic change and how it impacts subsistence resources and annual food-gathering activities. Data collected on the local impacts of changing environmental conditions can potentially provide insight into past adaptations under similar conditions and provide information about local impacts of climate change that can be added to an emerging Arctic-wide data base on impacts of global warming.
This project has substantial local community involvement through the close collaboration with local assistants, the training and participation of high school students in the oral history and archaeological excavation portions of the project, and assistance provided to the Kiana traditional council with their project to develop their own cultural heritage programs. This is all part of the research teams' continuing dedication to collaborate with local residents in interpretation and presentation of information about the history of the region.
