Life at Swift Water Place: Northwest Alaska at the Threshold of European Contact

By Wanni W. Anderson

This is a multidisciplinary study of the early contact period of Alaskan Native history that follows a major hunting and fishing Inupiaq group at a time of momentous change in their lifeways. The Amilgaqtau yaagmiut were the most powerful group in the Kobuk River area. But their status was forever transformed thanks to two major factors. They faced a food shortage prompted by the decline in caribou, one of their major foods. This was also the time when European and Asian trade items were first introduced into their traditional society. The first trade items to arrive, a decade ahead of the Europeans themselves, were glass beads and pieces of metal that the Inupiat expertly incorporated into their traditional implements. This book integrates ethnohistoric, bio-anthropological, archaeological, and oral historical analyses.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781602233690

Book preview

life at swift water place

NORTHWEST ALASKA AT THE THRESHOLD OF EUROPEAN CONTACT

University of Alaska Press

Fairbanks

Text © 2019 University of Alaska Press

Published by University of Alaska Press

P.O. Box 756240

Fairbanks, AK 99775-6240

Cover and interior design by University of Alaska Press

Interior layout by Rachel Fudge

Cover landscape: Aerial view of the Kobuk River with the Baird Mountains visible in the background.

Design Pics Inc. (EPC2F1), Alamy Stock Photo.

Cover artifact: An intricately carved antler artifact from Swift Water Place, most likely a button. Photograph by Douglas D. Anderson.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Anderson, Douglas D., editor. | Anderson, Wanni W. (Wanni Wibulswasdi), 1937– editor.

Title: Life at Swift Water Place : Alaska at the threshold of European contact / Douglas D. Anderson and Wanni W. Anderson, editors.

Description: Fairbanks, AK : University of Alaska Press, [2019]. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018028763 (print) | LCCN 2018059505 (e-book) | ISBN 9781602233690 (e-book) | ISBN 9781602233683 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Inupiat—Social life and customs 19th century. | Inupiat—Alaska—Kobuk River Valley History 19th century. | Inupiat—First contact with Europeans—Alaska—Kobuk River Valley.

Classification: LCC E99.E7 (e-book) | LCC E99.E7 L5495 2019 (print) | DDC 979.8/6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028763

To Ruth Blankenship Sandvik (1928–2014) of Kiana for her trust, strong support, and kind hospitality to all of us, the Swift Water Place research team.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

List of Maps

List of Tables

Foreword by Robin Kornfield

Preface by Douglas D. Anderson

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Douglas D. Anderson

Chapter 1. The Archaeology of Swift Water Place

Douglas D. Anderson and Bruce J. Lutz

Chapter 2. Survival and Settlement on the Kobuk: A Zooarchaeological Investigation of Two Northwest Alaska Houses

Rebekah DeAngelo and Zoe Weiss

Chapter 3. Geophysical Investigations at Swift Water Place

Thomas M. Urban

Chapter 4. Dendrochronology of Swift Water Place and Other Tree-Ring Samples from Northwest Alaska

Carol Griggs, Cynthia Kocik, Thomas M. Urban, and Sturt W. Manning

Chapter 5. Iñuułiq Niġisuk: Bioarchaeological Assessment of Human Remains Recovered from Swift Water Place

Gary P. Aronsen

Chapter 6. Genetic and Microscopic Analysis of Human Dental Calculus from Swift Water Place

Christina Warinner, Andrew Ozga, Anita Radini, Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan, and Cecil M. Lewis Jr.

Chapter 7. Stable Isotopic Dietary Analysis of Human and Faunal Remains from Swift Water Place

Peter W. Ditchfield, Thomas M. Urban, and Douglas D. Anderson

Chapter 8. Molecular Genetic Analysis of the Human Remains at Swift Water Place

Justin Tackney, Elisa Fair, and Dennis H. O’Rourke

Chapter 9. Triangulating Oral History, Archaeology, and Geophysics at Swift Water Place

Wanni W. Anderson

Chapter 10. Northwest Alaska Iñupiaq Historiography

Douglas D. Anderson and Wanni W. Anderson

Appendices

About the Authors

Index

FIGURES

Figure 1.1       Vegetation of Swift Water Place

Figure 1.2.      Vegetative cover in and around the smaller house pits

Figure 1.3       House K depression prior to excavation

Figure 1.4       House K

Figure 1.5       Central hearth of House K

Figure 1.6       Cross section of House K

Figure 1.7       Closeup of birch-bark sheets lining the walls of House K

Figure 1.8       Upright planks lining the rear wall of House K

Figure 1.9       Distribution of cultural objects in and around House K

Figure 1.10     Plan of House K

Figure 1.11     Plan of House I

Figure 1.12     Comparison of the size of Houses I and K

Figure 1.13     Photo of House I

Figure 1.14     Photo of House I hearth

Figure 1.15     Distribution of cultural materials in cross section, House I

Figure 1.16     Interpreted arrangement of superstructure of House I

Figure 1.17     Profile of central paired post and single post/ridgepole construction

Figure 1.18     Photo of the cluster of net sinkers in House I

Figure 1.19     Fishing equipment from House K

Figure 1.20     Fishing equipment from House I

Figure 1.21     Net sinkers from floor, House I

Figure 1.22     Ice picks, etc. from House K

Figure 1.23     Fishing equipment, etc. from House I

Figure 1.24     Hunting equipment from House K

Figure 1.25     Hunting equipment from House I

Figure 1.26     Sea and land mammal hunting equipment from House K

Figure 1.27     Household equipment of stone from House K

Figure 1.28     Household equipment from House K

Figure 1.29     Household items from House I

Figure 1.30     Spatulate and other objects from House K

Figure 1.31     Bivariate plots of selected isotopes of Northwest Alaska potsherds

Figure 1.32     Litho plots for four potsherds from House K

Figure 1.33     Dentate sherds from House I

Figure 1.34     Corrugated and cord-marked sherds from House I

Figure 1.35     Dashed linear sherds from House I

Figure 1.36     Rim sherds from House K

Figure 1.37     Grinding and polished stones, cleavers, chopping tool from House K

Figure 1.38     Knives and knife handles from House K

Figure 1.39     Drawing showing the use of a burin in the reduction process of antler

Figure 1.40     Knives and cut antler from House I

Figure 1.41     Adze sockets, blade, and handles from House K

Figure 1.42     Artifacts from floor of House I

Figure 1.43     Stitched birch-bark sheets used in house construction, House I

Figure 1.44     Sled runners and sled shoe fragments from House K

Figure 1.45     Snowshoe runners and shoes from House I

Figure 1.46     Labrets and other decorated objects from House K

Figure 1.47     Eskimo men and a woman, by Adelbert von Chamisso, 1816

Figure 1.48     Close-up of possible decorated star-shaped labret

Figure 1.49     Glass beads from House K

Figure 1.50     Close-up of decorated object from House K

Figure 1.51     House I, facing west

Figure 1.52     Objects associated with human remains from House I

Figure 2.1       Nonaxial postcranial ptarmigan elements by side

Figure 2.2       Nonaxial postcranial ptarmigan elements by portion of bone

Figure 2.3       Illustration of pigeon bones containing hemopoietic marrow

Figure 3.1       Layout of visible features at Swift Water Place and elevation model

Figure 3.2       Electromagnetic survey overview

Figure 3.3       EM results draped into site topography

Figure 3.4       Magnetic survey results

Figure 3.5       Magnetic response of the western depression of House B

Figure 3.6       GPR survey overview

Figure 3.7       3-D visualization of Houses D and E

Figure 3.8       House I GPR survey

Figure 3.9       GPR survey area around House I depression

Figure 3.10     GPR of Houses F, G, K, L, and I

Figure 3.11     GPR results of the southeast of the site

Figure 3.12     Summary of surface features and geophysical anomalies

Figure 4.1       Map of Swift Water Place (KOVA), KUT, TAU, and WLK sampling

Figure 4.2       Samples included in the Northwest Alaska baseline chronology

Figure 4.3       Northwest Alaska baseline and ITRDB chronologies

Figure 4.4       House I samples

Figure 4.5       House K samples

Figure 4.6       Visual comparison of the baseline and archaeological chronologies

Figure 4.7       Visual comparison of ITRDB data sets and Short House I chronology

Figure 4.8       Northwest Alaska chronology against combined ITRDB chronologies

Figure 4.9       Samples, years covered, and end dates of archaeological samples

Figure 4.10     Calendar dating probabilities for the non-OxA radiocarbon dates

Figure 4.11     Dating model for Houses I and K

Figure 5.1       Element inventories for IGHI-B1–B3

Figure 5.2       FORDISC comparison of IGHI-B2 to Alaska male populations

Figure 5.3       IGHI-B2

Figure 5.4       IGHI-B2 dental health

Figure 5.5       IGHI-B1 cranium, frontal and lateral

Figure 5.6       IGHI-B1 dental health

Figure 5.7       IGHI-B2 dental wear

Figure 5.8       IGHI-B3

Figure 5.9       Radiograph of IGHI-B2 cranium

Figure 5.10     Carnivore damage to Swift Water human skeletal elements

Figure 5.11     IGHI element distribution

Figure 5.12     IGHI human bone fragments compared to animal bone

Figure 6.1       Unprocessed dental calculus from IGHI-B2

Figure 6.2       Estimated microbial composition of the Swift Water Place samples

Figure 6.3       Taxonomy of the dental calculus samples and comparative samples

Figure 6.4       Starch granules recovered in situ dental calculus

Figure 7.1       Nitrogen and carbon-stable isotopic results for extracted bone collagen

Figure 7.2       Isospace plot of the input to the simmr model for Swift Water

Figure 7.3a–c Mixing model analyses

Figure 8.1       Sample library mitochondrial sequence coverage

Figure 8.2       Maximum Parsimony phylogenetic tree and BEAST coalescence dates of the A2b mtDNA haplogroup

Figure 9.1       Thomas Jackson, Kiana, 2012

Figure 9.2       Andrew Sakvali Jackson and his second wife, Alice Paluk

Figure 9.3       Percy Jackson of Kiana

Figure 9.4       Amiḷġaqtauyaaq nation

Figure 9.5       Stonewall Jackson, 1941

Figure 9.6       Robert Cleveland and his wife, Flora, 1966

MAPS

Map i.1 Northwestern Alaska, showing Swift Water Place (Igliqtiqsiuġvigruaq)

TABLES

Table 1.1         Percentage of artifacts from Houses I and K related to food-getting

Table 1.2         Color of glass objects from Houses I and K, based on Munsell Color

Table 2.1         NISP, %NISP by faunal category from Houses I and K

Table 2.2         Identified fish from Houses I and K

Table 2.3         NISP, %NISP, MNE, MNI of birds from Houses I and K

Table 2.4         NISP, %NISP, MNE, MNI of terrestrial mammals from Houses I and K

Table 2.5         NISP, %NISP, MNE, MNI of marine mammals from Houses I and K

Table 3.1         Major geophysical anomaly and feature types

Table 4.1         Kobuk Valley and Northwest Alaska baseline spruce samples

Table 4.2         Baseline chronology with the two ITRDB chronologies

Table 4.3         Swift Water Place archaeological samples and represented dates

Table 4.4         Supporting statistics between all KOVA chronologies

Table 4.5         Aarchaeological chronologies compared to ITRDB data sets

Table 4.6         Northwest Alaska spruce chronologies

Table 4.7         Northwest Alaska and ITRDB spruce chronologies

Table 4.8         Radiocarbon dates on samples from Swift Water Place

Table 5.1         FORDISC craniometric comparisons to Alaska Native males

Table 6.1         Dental calculus and environmental control samples

Table 6.2         DNA extraction results from IGHI dental calculus and control samples

Table 6.3         DNA sequence quality and microbial OTU assignment statistics

Table 6.4         Swift Water Place dental calculus samples analyzed for microfossils

Table 6.5         Oral bacterial genera in the Swift Water Place dental calculus

Table 7.1a–c   Collagen for stable isotopic analysis of human materials, terrestial fauna, and fish from Houses I and K

Table 7.2         Source stable isotopic data

Table 7.3         Model output statistics

Table 8.1         Oligonucleotides used in this study

Table 8.2         NGS library workflow

Table 8.3         Sequencing and bioinformatics pipeline metrics

APPENDICES

Appendix 2.1 Bird and mammal elements from Houses I and K

Appendix 5.1 Skull measurements

Appendix 5.2 IGHI craniometric and odontometric data

Appendix 5.3 FORDISC Results

FOREWORD

Swift Water Place had long been a mystery to my family and to the people along the Kobuk River.

My mother, Ruth Blankenship Sandvik, graduate of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and owner of Blankenship Trading Post in the Northwest Alaska village of Kiana, was fascinated with archaeology. In 1940, Ruth would have been 12 years old when Louis Giddings, an archaeologist from the University of Alaska, walked overland from Allakaket in the Interior to find the headwaters of the Kobuk River. He traveled on foot and eventually found the Kobuk, built a raft, and floated down, stopping along the way at likely places where there might be evidence of ancient villages. Giddings was studying the use of tree rings to date the time that people might have lived in those villages. He went as far as Kiana, which is where my mother met him.

Ruth was influenced by Giddings and other archaeologists, including Otto Geist, whom she worked for as secretary during college. Like them, Ruth wanted to understand who her ancestors were and where they came from. And she liked to collect things. Ruth was still angry with her parents 50 years later for giving away her collection of lamps when she was away at school. A lamp, used to warm and provide light in an Iñupiaq dugout house, was made by carving a depression in a flat rock. Oil was placed in the depression and a lighted wick, perhaps made from spruce root or grass, would warm the house. Ruth had been collecting them ever since she met Giddings, who showed her what to look for.

There is a hill looking over the river just up from our house and store. Kids used to come running into the store and they’d say, "Ruth, I got akmaak." I thought akmaak meant old thing because they would bring pieces of jade that had been sharpened for a knife, chips from arrowhead making, and bits of other old hunting gear that had accumulated on that hill where hunters long ago would watch for game. Akmaak is actually the word for flint, which is what the arrowheads were made out of. Ruth would give a candy bar to anyone who would bring her an akmaak.

Our family worked hard in Kiana, either in the store or on building projects, but we took off Sundays and always took a boat trip on the river. Twenty-seven miles up there is a place that I don’t recall anyone calling by name. I learned later it was called Igliqtiqsiuġvigruaq, or Swift Water Place. We would stop there, build a fire for lunch, and walk the beach. Ruth said my grandmother would seine off the gravel beach for whitefish, but no one ever stayed on that shore overnight. It was a spooky place, she said, and you would not sleep well there.

At Igliqtiqsiuġvigruaq, river ice jams into the bank during high water in the spring and erodes the soil and trees, revealing the remains of dugout houses. We can see layers on the cutbank. The dark place about three feet up is the floor of the house. Ashes and bits of black burned wood mark the fireplace. Sharp eyes could spy an ivory sewing needle or fishing lure made of bone lying among the stones on the beach to add to my mother’s collection. Today, searching for relics is frowned upon, and in fact illegal, but Ruth felt she had as much right as anyone to discover these items.

Louis Giddings came back to the Kobuk in 1960, along with a young archaeology student named Doug Anderson. Like Giddings, Anderson made it his life’s work to study the people of Northwest Alaska.

In 2013, Ruth told me that Doug Anderson and his wife, Wanni Anderson, both professors at Brown University, would be conducting a field study at Igliqtiqsiuġvigruaq. I ran a communications department for NANA, the Native corporation owned by the Iñupiaq of Northwest Alaska. We decided to produce a documentary about the Andersons’ project to help the people from the region learn about their own ancestors who used to live in this very important place on the Kobuk River. Our film crew interviewed representatives of the Elders Council in Kiana and Doug’s excavation team members as well as Minnie Gray, the last surviving daughter of Robert Cleveland, who was born at Swift Water Place.

Wanni Anderson is an anthropologist and folklorist. While Doug Anderson gets his information by carefully digging through layers of dirt to find and study how people lived, Wanni gets her information by sifting through the memories of elders and the stories they heard in their lifetime. What was most remarkable was the corroboration between the stories about Igliqtiqsiuġvigruaq and Doug Anderson’s archaeological findings.

Those of us who come from the Kobuk River are alive thanks to the skills of our ancestors, who developed tools and techniques for living successfully in the Arctic. There is still much to learn and share. I am grateful to those who have dedicated their lifetime of study to our part of Alaska. Without their work, there is no doubt that the naturally occurring river erosion would eventually have erased all traces of the people who lived at Igliqtiqsiuġvigruaq. Thank you to the University of Alaska for publishing the Swift Water Place findings.

—Robin Sandvik Kornfield

Producer of the documentary Igliqtiqsiuġvigruaq (Swift Water Place)

Anchorage, Alaska

PREFACE

Douglas D. Anderson

Our investigation of Swift Water Place, a village site on the lower reaches of the Kobuk River, is part of a broad study of social and trade relationships among the coastal and riverine Iñupiat around Kotzebue Sound over the past millennium. Prior to our work at the site, we had already obtained a fairly representative coverage of archaeological sites from the region, except that we lacked sites from the protohistoric period along the lower Kobuk River. In searching for a suitable archaeological reference point to fill in this lacuna, our earlier recollections about Igliqtiqsiuġvigruaq, an archaeological site I had identified and mapped in 1979, came to mind. At the time, we were not certain of its age, nor were we aware that it was the site referred to in legends we had recorded earlier about warring shamans in the region. But from our long experience in identifying the age of sites based on the condition of the house pits, we suspected that the site was likely within the requisite age range. We began in 2008 to develop our research design to investigate the site and to initiate the necessary permission protocols for the research. Before applying for an excavation permit from the US Department of the Interior, we sought permission from the Traditional Council of Kiana, the village on the Kobuk nearest the site, as well as all the other Native villages of the Northwest Arctic Native Association (NANA) region, the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) in Anchorage, and, since the site was located within the Kobuk Valley National Monument, also the US National Park Service (NPS). It took several attempts to write a sufficiently detailed research design to satisfy NPS stipulations, but we were finally granted permission in 2010. It was only after we obtained two radiocarbon dates from our 2010 survey charcoal samples that we were able to confirm its 18th- or 19th-century age. And, as we began to piece together the oral historic references to the site, we began to realize this was not only one of the region’s major abandoned villages but also the location of one of the legendary warring shamans.

Then, during our first season of full-scale excavations in 2011, we unexpectedly encountered the human remains from one of the houses, which as per federal regulations required us to cease all work there. At this point, the residents of Kiana, led by the Kiana Traditional Council, became curious as to how the persons, three individuals, had died. Oral history about the site included several different legendary accounts about the fate of the residents—they had died of starvation, Indians had attacked the village, and the village shamans had conducted some black magic there. The Kiana Traditional Council successfully negotiated with the NPS to allow us to continue excavations there, so we resumed work in 2013. The success of this study, and results of our research, are largely due to the perseverance of the council, which led to the first excavations of human remains that, to our knowledge, the NPS has permitted on lands they control.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As with all anthropological studies, our three-year research project (2010–2013) at Swift Water Place has many individuals and organizations to whom we owe our sincere thanks. Without their efforts, we could not even have begun the project. We were fortunate in being able to assemble an exceptionally capable team of experts, most of whom worked with us in the field as well as in their own home laboratories: Dr. Gary Aronsen (Yale University), Rebekah DeAngelo (Yale University), Dr. Peter Ditchfield (Oxford University), Elisa Fair (University of Kansas), Carol Griggs (Cornell University), Dr. William Hunt (NPS, retired), Cynthia Kocik (Cornell University), Dr. Bruce Lutz (Colorado State University—Pueblo), Dr. Sturt Manning (Cornell University), Dr. Dennis O’Rourke (University of Kansas), Justin Tackney (University of Kansas), Thomas Urban (Cornell University), Dr. Christina Warinner (University of Oklahoma), and Dr. Zoe Weiss (Brown University). In addition, we were ably assisted in excavations and logistics by Kiana residents Ben Sheldon and Waylon Schuerch.

As part of the National Science Foundation’s mandate to train future generations of Alaska researchers, our project included as field assistants a number of Brown University undergraduate students: Peter Hatch and Nick Morley for the 2010 field season; Peter Hatch, Conor Sullivan, Zoe Weiss, and Laura Berman for the 2011 field season; and Edward Cloefe and Aquinas College student Mitchell Kohler for the 2013 field season. We also engaged two Iñupiaq high school student interns: Vera Atorak as an oral history intern and Peter Culver as an archaeology intern. In 2013, we were also fortunate to have NPS personnel joining us in the field: Dr. Daniel Odess from the Washington, D.C., office excavated at the site for a month, Jennifer Peterson Weinberger from the Anchorage office, and Mike Holt and Hannah Atkinson from the Kotzebue office, who joined the excavations for a week.

We express our deepest appreciation for the Traditional Council, Native Village of Kiana, in particular Charlie Curtis, Gloria Shellabarger, Dale Stotts, and Ruth Blankenship Sandvik, whose enthusiasm for the local Iñupiaq history was most instrumental in enabling us to pursue the research that has resulted in this publication. In addition, we thank key oral history informants in Kiana: Thomas Jackson and Percy Jackson, and Larry and Christina Westlake. Lorie Schuerch has likewise been a strong Kiana supporter of our research. Minnie Grey of Ambler assisted to identify her family ancestry as one of the families from Swift Water Place. Cognizant of the significance of archaeology to Iñupiaq local history, the Northwest Arctic Native Association (NANA) has granted us permission to conduct this research and has always been there for us throughout the process. We also thank Robin Kornfield and NANA’s Piksik Corporation for creating the award-winning film Igliqtiqsiuġvigruaq (Swift Water Place), which describes our excavations at the site. The film, directed by Brice Habeger and distributed by American Public Television, has been uniformly well received in numerous national and international showings.

We also thank National Park Service personnel, especially Robert Gal and Eileen Devinney in the Anchorage office and Frank Hays, Northwest Alaska park superintendent, who worked with the Kiana Traditional Council to make the project a reality. The original site map, which we used as our baseline map, was expertly made by Dr. David Gregg and Eileen Devinney. The house drawings were made by Kari Anderson.

Logistical matters at the Swift Water Place site were managed by Marin Kuizenga and Christie Haupert of CH2M Hill Polar Programs, with Kenet Nichols and Dean Einerson as camp managers in 2011 and 2013, respectively. Dr. Norm Eck, superintendent of the Northwest Arctic Borough School District, cooperated with the project by allowing Wanni Anderson to rent a teacher’s apartment in Kiana during her oral history study.

The project was entirely funded by the National Science Foundation, and here we wish to express our deepest appreciation to Anna Kerttula, whose enthusiasm and dedication to Arctic social science research and to our research project has provided significant encouragement and inspiration to us all.

Finally, we would like to thank the individuals who reviewed our manuscript and the staff at the University of Alaska Press, especially Krista West, production editor, who has expertly guided us through the editorial process and cover design, and Elizabeth Laska, assistant editor.

—Douglas D. Anderson and Wanni W. Anderson

INTRODUCTION

Douglas D. Anderson

Northwest Alaska has been home to many small Iñupiaq nations for well over a millennium. Among the most important of these are the Amilġaqtauyaaqmiut, who occupied the main valley of the Kobuk River from just below the present Native village of Kiana to just above Hunt River 27 miles upriver. They are part of the Akuniġmiut, or group of nations identified by Ernest S. Burch Jr. (1998) as occupying the central part of the Kobuk. The Amilġaqtauyaaqmiut lived in several small villages and campsites throughout the region, with their main village at Igliqtiqsiuġvigruaq, here referred to in its translated form as Swift Water Place. Our account here examines life at Swift Water Place as informed by archaeological findings, the oral history of the region, and several detailed scientific studies of the cultural and biological remains from the village site. Accounts of the oral history, supplemented by published and unpublished archival materials, have been obtained primarily from residents at the Native Village of Kiana, the current village nearest Swift Water Place.

Swift Water Place encompasses the remains of at least 26 house pits and numerous features strung out along the riverbank on a large meander loop. The original size of the village, which has been undergoing erosion for many years, is difficult to determine, though clearly was much larger when occupied than now.

Historical records for the region have a relatively shallow time depth, the earliest dating only to the first quarter of the 19th century, when, on August 2, 1816, Otto von Kotzebue first sailed into Kotzebue Sound. Especially for the Interior of northwestern Alaska, written records remain few and far between until the last quarter of the 19th century, when US government-sponsored explorers and missionaries, independent traders, and prospectors began to travel up the rivers. We have now made considerable progress, however, in understanding the protohistory of the region by combining the oral historic with archaeological, biological, and ethnographic information, each used to test the reliability of the other, and we have found a surprisingly close match between them.

Our research at Swift Water Place has centered on the excavation of two house ruins in the middle of the village, House I and House K, supplemented by geophysical survey, mapping, and test excavations in several of the numerous small features at the site. Even before we realized the site was the home of the Amilġaqtauyaaqmiut, we surmised that the now-abandoned village dated to the late prehistoric or protohistoric period of the region, and this was subsequently confirmed by radiometric and dendrochronological dating of the excavated ruins. Using a combination of different techniques, we have in fact been able to pinpoint the date of occupation of the two excavated houses to the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

Although the arrival of von Kotzebue represents the first physical appearance of Europeans, the transition from the region’s precontact to contact times, which we identify as protohistoric, spans at least a century, beginning well back into the 1700s, if not earlier. Situated in an area in which riverine–coastal contacts were already long well established, the residents of the two Swift Water Place houses we excavated clearly would have been well aware of—and even possibly participated in—the historic happenings associated with the European arrival at the coast. And as we show, even prior to European contact the residents were participating in a global trade network that brought in European or Asian products.

The physical layout and details of the excavations are described in chapter 1, The Archaeology of Swift Water Place. In this chapter, Anderson and Lutz describe the structure and contents of one small family house and of a second, larger house in the village, which they argue is of a wealthy individual, possibly an umialik, that may also have also served as a traditional community house (qargi). Exotic foreign materials included small bits of iron hafted in traditional ways and glass beads, likely used for personal ornamentation. Indigenous raw materials used in the manufacture of implements included types of stone acquired locally, pottery clay obtained from more distant sources, and caribou antler, which though common in the house middens must have been acquired from well beyond the locality.

In chapter 2, Survival and Settlement on the Kobuk, Rebekah DeAngelo and Zoe Weiss undertake a detailed analysis of the faunal remains from the site. They identify and quantify the remains of not only the major Arctic species present but also species of normally difficult-to-identify avian and fish bones. Their study rounds out a picture of the residents’ subsistence way of life that was centered on fish and confirms that, despite the quantities of caribou antler present, caribou bones were nearly absent.

In chapter 3, Geophysical Investigations at Swift Water Place, Thomas Urban describes some innovative technological approaches to spatial analysis that had previously seen little use for archaeology in the Arctic. Through nondestructive geophysical surveys, including magnetic gradiometry, electromagnetic induction, and ground-penetrating radar, use areas invisible to the naked eye and, surprisingly, even the existence of earlier episodes of the village not suspected by traditional survey methods are revealed. More specifically, through the use of geophysical methods, Urban has detected hearths and a possible dog yard location as described in Urban, Anderson, and Anderson (2012), a deeper site occupation described in Urban et al. (2016), and aspects of the site that may corroborate some elements of the site’s oral history as described by Wanni Anderson (ch. 9).

Assessing the age of the site is the subject of chapter 4, Dendrochronology of Swift Water Place and Other Tree-Ring Samples from Northwest Alaska, in which Carol Griggs et al. utilize the latest dendrochronological techniques to help resolve some ambiguities and conflicts in dates obtained from our employment of other dating techniques. The precision of the ages of the two houses provides the basis for viewing the region’s lifeways at the moment of European contact.

During the excavation of the smaller house (House I), skeletal remains of three human individuals were discovered buried in the floor midden. The fact that the three persons appear to have succumbed at about the same time has prompted questions surrounding their deaths. Gary P. Aronsen’s chapter 5, "Iñuułiq Niġisuk: Bioarchaeological Assessment of Human Remains Recovered from Swift Water Place," not only examines evidence that might suggest trauma or other indications of how they had died but also identifies evidence of their way of life. Although Aronsen concludes that one individual had suffered some trauma to one of his legs, he finds nothing to suggest that it had been fatal. Also, Aronsen suggests the individuals were undergoing nutritional stress, but he concludes it unlikely this was sufficiently severe to cause death by starvation.

In his examination of the human remains, Aronsen recovered some dental calculus from the teeth of one of the individuals. We sent the samples to Christina Warinner, University of Oklahoma, who with her coauthors produced an interesting account that appears here as chapter 6, Genetic and Microscopic Analysis of Human Dental Calculus from Swift Water Place.

Using isotopic methods for examining the diet