Last October, remnants of Typhoon Halong swept through western Alaska — causing widespread flooding and displacing over a thousand people in multiple far-flung villages off the state's road system.
In the coastal village of Quinhagak, the storm shook houses and damaged some buildings and infrastructure. And the day after it hit, Jenny Matthew and her husband rode four-wheelers along the torn-up beach, assessing the damage.
The wind and floodwaters had peeled the tundra up like discarded carpeting. And as Matthew scanned the debris, suddenly, something caught her eye.
"I said to my husband, 'Look, what's that?' We stopped. He got up and took it, and it was that bowl," Matthew remembered.
The bowl was wooden and smooth. It was carved by Quinhagak residents somewhere between 400 and 600 years ago and was one of thousands of cultural objects scattered along the coastline.
The storm had unearthed it from an archaeological dig site called Nunalleq that sits near the village. It's renowned as one of the best examples of Alaska Native Yup'ik culture before Western contact and serves as an important link to Quinhagak's past. Not only had the storm scattered many objects from the site, it also increased the risks for what was still in the ground by eroding more of the land buffer between the Bering Sea and where these artifacts are buried.
This past summer, a team of archaeologists came to the village for an emergency dig to recover as much as possible before the next big storm.
Precious objects slowly being excavated
Archaeologists have been working at this dig site since 2009, according to lead archaeologist Rick Knecht. He says that after thawing permafrost revealed significant numbers of these objects in the early 2000s, the village deliberated and decided to try to save these pieces of their culture.
They include hand-carved animals, grass rope, sewing needles, ornate wooden masks and pieces of kayaks.
According to the archaeologists, the frozen ground has helped preserve artifacts composed of organic material, which they say would have likely eroded under different conditions.
The team, Knecht says, is mostly made up of volunteers and has a shoestring budget with funding from the Pacific Northwest Archaeological Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution, among others.
The whole archaeological site is about the size of two Olympic-size pools, but the emergency dig area is smaller, about the size of a backyard pool. It's a hole that has been dug around the buried remnants of several sod houses that date back 400 to 500 years.
Digging against time
Charlotta Hillerdal, who has been part of this excavation for over 15 years, was home in Scotland when she heard about the storm damage.
"I was crying," Hillerdal said. "It was a horrible feeling."
Knecht said that since the dig began, they've watched the Bering Sea creep closer and closer to the site. Shorelines in this part of Alaska are now more vulnerable to erosion due, in part, to decreasing sea ice and permafrost thaw. Both are fueled by human-caused climate change.
Last October's storm closed the distance even more. Now, at some high tides, seawater can reach into the pit.
"It's every bit as tough as working in front of bulldozers," Knecht explained.
In October, the flooding was so extensive that the site was covered by feet of water. When it receded, it took many valuable objects with it. They're worried that could happen again.
Knecht said they hope to return to the site next summer, though they're still raising the money to do so through a GoFundMe campaign and Quinhagak Heritage Inc., the nonprofit that oversees the dig.
"I'll be damned if I'm going to leave this for the waves," Knecht said. "It's like you might as well take those pieces of artwork we're finding and skip it off into the Bering Sea."
"When you know that you come from a people that were so resilient … you get a boost"
At the Nunalleq Culture and Archaeology Center — a museum-style building and lab — these pieces of Quinhagak's past are available for their direct descendants to access, along with the public.
"We all as humans want to know who we are and where we come from, and having the Nunalleq there for us strengthens that," said Elizabeth Church, director of Quinhagak Heritage Inc., which manages the center as well as the dig.
Church said seeing the artifacts exploded onto the beach was traumatic. It underscored the community's desire to steward their ancestors' belongings.
"They are interwoven into us as people, and we feel a great sense of responsibility to care for them well, and to take them into the future with us," Church said.
There's evidence of people adapting to environmental change and making technological progress.
"When you know that you come from a people that were so resilient and so capable and so talented and so smart — you get a boost," Church said. "It's amazing."
She said that with fall storm season fast approaching, the scramble is urgent to recover what they can of this past.
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