an ordinary ethnography

Duck-Billed Axe Head

WATCH: “I Am an Alaska Native Dancer”

The excavation on Triquet Island has already produced extremely rare artifacts, including a wooden projectile-launching device called an atlatl, compound fish hooks and a hand drill used for lighting fires, said Alisha Gauvreau, a PhD student at the University of Victoria.

The village has been in use for about 14,000 years, based on analysis of charcoal recovered from a hearth about 2.5 metres below the surface, making it one of the oldest First Nations settlements yet uncovered. Dates from the most recent tests range from 13,613 to 14,086 years ago.

“We were so happy to find something we could date,” she said. What started as a one-metre-by-one-metre “keyhole” into the past, expanded last summer into a three-metre trench with evidence of fire related in age to a nearby cache of stone tools.

“It appears we had people sitting in one area making stone tools beside evidence of a fire pit, what we are calling a bean-shaped hearth,” she said. “The material that we have recovered from that trench has really helped us weave a narrative for the occupation of this site.”

The site is roughly as old as the groundbreaking Manis Mastodon spear tip found on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, a find that pushed estimates of the earliest human occupation on the West Coast back by 800 years to about 13,800 years before the present day.

Gauvreau will present her findings at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archeology on Thursday in Vancouver. The five-day conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre will be attended by 3,000 archeologists from around the world.

Sea levels at Triquet Island have been extraordinarily stable over the millennia, which helped to preserve evidence of continuous use, and dramatic changes in the occupants’ hunting and eating habits. The natural rise and fall of sea levels and of the Earth’s tectonic plates have left ancient villages on other parts of the coast submerged.

The evidence suggests that for 7,000 years of the people’s early history, they hunted and ate large mammals, especially seals and sea lions.

“It’s a lot more work to hunt large animals, but when you get one, you get a lot,” she said. “It’s a high caloric payoff.”

Then around 5,700 years ago, their diet shifted to fin fish. Evidence of shellfish processing is found throughout the village’s history, right up to very recent times.

The beach nearby has been altered with fish traps and stone-walled clam gardens, which are common to marine-subsistence cultures on the West Coast.

A five-metre-deep midden (trash heap) runs 70 m between the beach and the village site.

“I’m really anxious to get into the midden deposits to see if evidence of this dietary change holds up,” said Gauvreau.

Around the same time period, the village appears to have survived two tsunamis, one about 6,700 years ago and a second roughly 5,600 years ago.

Evidence of habitation appears to drop off after the earliest tsunami, which could mean the site went unused for a time and was repopulated by people with different eating habits.

“It’s just one snapshot of a larger site, so it’s hard to tell what was happening,” she said. “But that kind of dietary shift — from predominantly hunting to a reliance on fishing and shellfish — was happening coast-wide.”

A study of the DNA in ancient skeletal remains adds to the evidence that indigenous groups living today in southern Alaska and the western coast of British Columbia are descendants of the first humans to make their home in northwest North America more than 10,000 years ago.

“Our analysis suggests that this is the same population living in this part of the world over time, so we have genetic continuity from 10,000 years ago to the present,” said University of Illinois anthropology professor Ripan Malhi, who led the study with University of Chicago postdoctoral researcher John Lindo; Penn State University biology professor Michael DeGiorgio; Rosita Worl, the director of the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau, Alaska; and University of Oklahoma anthropology professor Brian M. Kemp.

The findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also suggest that these early American peoples had a complex population history, the researchers report.

The new work comes on the heels of earlier studies of ancient Americans that focused on mitochondrial DNA, which occurs outside the nucleus of cells and is passed only from mothers to their offspring.

“Mitochondrial DNA just traces the maternal line - your mother’s mother’s lineage - so, you’re missing information about all of these other ancestors,” said Lindo, the first author on the paper. “We wanted to analyze the nuclear genome so we could get a better assessment of the population history of this region.”

The team looked at genomic data from Shuká Káa (Tlingit for “Man Before Us”), an ancient individual whose remains - found in a cave in southeastern Alaska - date to about 10,300 years ago. They also analyzed the genomes of three more individuals from the nearby coast of British Columbia whose remains date to between 6,075 and 1,750 years ago.

“Interestingly, the mitochondrial type that Shuká Káa belonged to was also observed from another ancient skeleton dated to about 6,000 years ago,” Kemp said. “It seems to disappear after that. The nuclear DNA suggests that this is probably not about population replacement, but rather chance occurrence through time. If a female has no children or only sons, the mitochondrial DNA is not passed to the next generation. As a male, Shuká Káa could not have passed on his own mitochondrial DNA; he must have had some maternal relatives that did so.”

The researchers turned their attention to nuclear DNA, which offers a more comprehensive record of a person’s ancestry.

“DNA from the mitochondria and Y chromosome provide unique yet sometimes conflicting stories, but the nuclear genome provides a more comprehensive view of past events,” DeGiorgio said.

“The data suggest that there were multiple genetic lineages in the Americas from at least 10,300 years ago,” Malhi said.

The descendants of some of those lineages are still living in the same region today, and a few are co-authors on the new study. Their participation is the result of a long-term collaboration between the scientists and several native groups who are embracing genomic studies as a way to learn from their ancestors, said Worl, who is Tlingit, Ch'áak’ (Eagle) moiety of the Shangukeidí­ (Thunderbird) Clan from the Kawdliyaayi Hít (House Lowered From the Sun) in Klukwan, Alaska.

Robert Davidon (series of drums from 1990 - present)

The key quote:

• Our yield, the percentage of students who accepted our invitation to enroll, rose in a single year from 18% to 26%, an amazing turnaround.

• The quantity of applications went down, but the quality went up, likely because we made it harder to apply, asking for more essays. Our applicants collectively were more motivated, mature, disciplined and consistent in their high school years than past applicants.

• Class diversity increased to 31% students of color, the most diverse in our history, up from 21% two years ago.

• The percentage of students who are the first-generation from their family to attend college rose from 10% to 18% in this year’s class.

Artstation: environment challenge - by Leon Tukker

Whanganui River first in the world to be given legal human status

[IMAGE: The Whanganui River is revered by New Zealand’s Māori people.]

The New Zealand parliament passed the bill recognising the Whanganui River, in North Island, as a living entity.

Long revered by Māori people, the river’s interests will now be represented by two people.

The Māori had been fighting for over 160 years to get this recognition for their river, a minister said.

“I know the initial inclination of some people will say it’s pretty strange to give a natural resource a legal personality,” said New Zealand’s Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson.

“But it’s no stranger than family trusts, or companies or incorporated societies.”

The Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third-longest, will be represented by one member from the Māori iwi, and one from the Crown.

The recognition allows it to be represented in court proceedings.

The Veil Nebula - Sharpless 103

Located 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust known as the Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula is the visible portion of a massive supernova that erupted around 7,000 years ago to form what is now known as the Cygnus Loop. The Veil Nebula has a diameter of 100 light-years which appears to be 6 times the diameter of the full moon in the night sky. Due to the scale of the Veil, astronomers often segment the nebula into western (Caldwell 34), eastern (Caldwell 33) and northern portions. This particular images shows the western portion of the nebula with NGC 6960 (the Witches Broom), NGC 6979 (Pickering’s Triangle), and other significant cataloged objects.