In 1987, I had the good fortune to join in the excavation of a phenomenal archae ological site on the western coast of Kodiak Island, in Alaska. The New Karluk site (a. k. a. , "Karluk One") was perched on the edge of the small village of Karluk at the mouth of the river of the same name, once one of the most productive salmon rivers in the North Pacific. I had just completed my sophomore year of college, and under the direction of Richard Jordan, I enthusiastically joined sev eral other students in the Kodiak Archaeology Projects New Karluk excavation. I had participated in my father's archaeological research in Eastern Canada since early childhood, but the Karluk dig was unlike any archaeology I had experienced before. For three months, we peeled back layers of grass, wood, and earth floors separated by remnants of ancient sod roofs. Due to the unusual preservation and richness of the site, at every tum we uncovered perishable items such as bent-wood bowls, masks, dolls, puffin-beak rattles, grass baskets, fragments of fiber netting, locks of hair, and food waste. Preservation was so excellent, in fact, that we often exposed grass blades still green after hundreds of years, which once exposed to air would tum brown before our eyes.

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Authors and Affiliations

University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Ben Fitzhugh

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: The Evolution of Complex Hunter-Gatherers
Book Subtitle: Archaeological Evidence from the North Pacific
Authors: Ben Fitzhugh
Series Title: Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0137-4
Publisher: Springer New York, NY
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive
Copyright Information: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York 2003
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-306-47753-9Published: 31 July 2003
Softcover ISBN: 978-0-306-47853-6Published: 31 July 2003
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4615-0137-4Published: 06 December 2012
Series ISSN: 1568-2722
Series E-ISSN: 2730-6984
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 332
Topics: Archaeology, Anthropology

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

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