Project Outcomes Report

Award No. 1048194

Project Title: Collaboration to Investigate the “Old Whaling” Culture and the Origins of Whaling in Chukotka

PI: Christopher B. Wolff

The initial goals of this research was to examine evidence in Chukotka of early whale hunting cultures and compare them with the enigmatic Old Whaling Site across the Bering Strait in Alaska (Figure 1). The origins of active whale hunting, as opposed to opportunistic use of beached whales, has long been thought to have only begun in the Bering Sea a little over 1000 years ago by the ancestors of modern Inuit. However, the Old Whaling Site located at Cape Krusenstern, Alaska, was considered by Dr. J. Louis Giddings and others to contain evidence of active whale hunting 2000 years earlier. The artifacts originally recovered at the Old Whaling site are unlike other contemporaneous cultures of coastal Alaska, so it was hypothesized that the Old Whaling people may have originated elsewhere and brought with them a new whale hunting technology. To investigate this possibility the original principal investigator of this project, Dr. Daniel Odess, thought to examine contemporaneous archaeological materials across the Bering Strait, a likely original homeland to the Old Whaling peoples.

            The Un’en’en Site, a 3000 year old contemporaneous site, was identified in Chukotka and was partially excavated by Odess and his Russian collaborator, Dr. Sergei Gusev. They made amazing discoveries, that included architecture and technology that somewhat resembled the Old Whaling materials; however, the most intriguing find was a walrus tusk that was incised with decorations of people hunting whales (Figure 2). This tusk was dated to just over 3000 years, demonstrating that people were indeed actively hunting whales at that time. The initial results of this research were published in the journal Science.

            Unfortunately, collaborative relationships with Russian colleagues disintegrated and the focus of the remaining grant funds were shifted towards further examination of the Old Whaling Site itself. Earlier researchers suggested there might be underlying deposits below previous excavated material that could shed light on the origins of the Old Whaling people. Dr. Christopher Wolff and a geophysicist, Thomas Urban, conducted new research at the site using ground penetrating radar and magnetometry to assess if there were deeply buried deposits. These methods were chosen because they were less invasive and the site now sits in the middle of a National Monument area, so conservation is important. The results of the geophysical research revealed that there are no substantial deposits underlying the main Old Whaling Site, leaving the origins of the people who occupied it still unknown. However, this research did reveal a broader story about climate change and its effects on permafrost in this environment (Figure 3).

            Using data from the original excavations and subsequent research, Wolff and Urban were able to trace the loss of permafrost from the middle of the 20^th century to modern times related to generally warming conditions in the Arctic, demonstrating that the northwestern coast of Alaska–and probably well beyond–are undergoing environmental change leading to the decline in permafrost in this region. The results of these effects were published in the journal Polar Science. This has broader implications concerning the conservation of archaeological sites in the north. The loss of permafrost will increasingly be a factor in the preservation and alteration in ...

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