Video
A Remarkable Career
Transcript
Karen: … a second chance to hear these papers. Beginning in November, we will hear a series of speakers talking about climate change and archeology. This is the third year that the Archeology Program has hosted webinars devoted to a particular topic as a way to stimulate discussions and keep in touch with the professional sides of our lives. We hope that the webinars will make learning about advances in our fields a little easier, so I hope that you'll all attend these webinars later in the fall.
One of our Cotter Award winners Jeanne Schaaf has graciously agreed to give a talk today about the accomplishments that netted her the John L. Cotter Cumulative Achievement Award. I’ve often used her research in my work in the Smithsonian's Repatriation Office, so it's wonderful to hear about this project. I'm really excited. I also want to pass on the congratulations of one of Jeanne's former colleagues, Sandy McDermot, who couldn't be with us today. She writes, "I've known Jeanne for many years and have long admired her work ethic, tenacity, and commitment to park resources. I would very much have liked to have been part of the call today. Please extend my congratulations." It's too bad that Sandy couldn't join us, but she can watch the recording, which will be posted on either the Archeology Program website or the Distance Learning website.
Our webmaster is very preoccupied with redesigning our website this year, and in the interim, the Distance Learning folks have offered to post some of our products on their website. I'll keep you posted about the details.
Before I introduce our speakers today, I have some administration I need to take care of. Thanks very much for your patience today. We had some challenges that I'm happy to report we've overcome. All of our lectures will be recorded, so please be mindful of that when you're asking questions. Also, when you're listening to the webinars, please set your phone to mute. Also, don't answer other phone calls and put us on hold because you'll be releasing beeps and elevator music into the webinar sound space, which will be recorded. Remember to unmute your phone when you want to ask a question. I think that takes care of all of my announcements.
Cari Kreshak who is the chairman of the John L. Cotter Award has graciously agreed to make a few remarks about the award. Cari, over to you.
Cari: Thank you, Karen. Hi, everyone. I'm Cari Kreshak, and I work in the Pacific West Region as the Section 106 program manager. I am also an archeologist, but I have to be honest. It's been a few years since I've actually done real archeology. I am also the John L. Cotter Award chair, and it's a really exciting opportunity to be a part of this award committee. I want to take a few minutes today just to give you a quick overview of who John L. Cotter was and a little bit about the award and how the awardees are selected. If you'll join me, I will click to my next slide.
I just want to tell you a little bit about John L. Cotter. Cotter attended the University of Denver, and he originally was intending to study English and pursue a career in journalism. However, he quickly found that he accrued more credits in anthropology than any other subjects. I'm going to give you just a couple seconds to read this quote from John L. Cotter that's on the slide. Go ahead and take a few seconds to read that.
This was a statement that John L. Cotter shared with Daniel Roberts, who's also a fellow ... He was an archeologist. I thought this was an interesting quote. It's particularly relevant to me because I had that same reaction when I was in school. I had started out with a different major but found myself being drawn to taking more and more and more anthropology classes but then stepping back and saying, "Gosh, what might I do with an anthropology degree or an archeology degree?" When I found this quote by Cotter, it really touched me because I remember having similar feelings.
I'm just going to quickly give you a little overview of John L. Cotter's career. He eventually started working on his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and that was in 1935. He failed his prelims in the Ph.D. program, so consequently went on to work for the National Park Service, which I think is kind of funny. In 1940, he actually accepted his first job with the National Park Service, and that was at Tuzigoot National Monument in central Arizona. [crosstalk 00:06:38]
Male: The meeting is going on right now. I'm supposed to be on the call, and I can't see what ... I got an audio conference number. That's not it, is it?
Karen: Sorry, we're holding the webinar. Guys? [crosstalk 00:06:55]
Male: ... 1575, and I'm on that. I can hear the audio.
Karen: Hi, and we're talking to you.
Male: 15 ... No [crosstalk 00:07:06]
Karen: Can you not talk into the phone please.
Female: Is the person talking, can you hear us?
Karen: I think he does. All right, please continue.
Cari: In 1943, John Cotter ended up joining the Army, and he was part of the invasion of Normandy.
Male: Here's my participant passcode, and that says participant passcode I guess.
Cari: I don't think he can hear us.
Karen: I wonder if he's on another webinar. If he says that he can hear us, he's not responding to us.
Cari: Sounds like he's having trouble dialing in, so he probably can't hear us.
Karen: Please continue, Cari.
Cari: Sorry about that, guys. Anyways, he had a little break in his archeology career while he was part of the invasion of Normandy.
Male: You know, Karen Mudar is the leader of the call, but I can hear her talking on the phone right now. Hang on a second now. It's actually security one.
Cari: Whoever that is will be very embarrassed when they find out.
Karen: And we're recording it, too!
Cari: I'll try to keep talking.
Karen: Just forge ahead.
Male: I think I have succeeded in fixing this. Thanks for your help.
Cari: Cotter became the acting chief archeologist of the National Park Service after he returned from his stint in the Army. Then in 1954, Cotter took charge of the field project at Jamestown in Virginia, and this was part of the 350th anniversary of that site. What I thought was interesting was this was the experience where Cotter really started to get excited and interested in historical archeology, so that was a little bit of a turning point in his career. He continued on with the National Park Service. He became the regional archeologist for the northeast region and stayed in that position until 1977. He had a full career with the National Park Service as well as some other things. Really an interesting, interesting guy. Like I said, I'm just giving you a little overview of his career, so if you want to do a little bit more research yourself, that would be great.
Here's just a quick slide of some of his major publications. You can take a quick look at that. I just thought I'd include that for your information.
The John L. Cotter Award itself is awarded annually, and it's a peer-reviewed award. It was established to recognize archeologists in the National Park Service who have worked on outstanding projects or done outstanding things in their career. I have to say I've just been on this committee for a year now or almost a year. The exciting thing about this award is that it's an opportunity for all of us who work in the field to recognize our colleagues and our peers who are doing some great things. I think it's a really great award, and I enjoyed being on the committee.
Let's see, a little bit more about the committee. Here is a list of the folks who are currently on the committee. Each committee member serves about three years, and we try to get a range of folks from different regions. You can see we have somebody from all the regions. The person who's going to rotate off next is Caven Clark from the Midwest region, so we'll have a vacancy on the committee after September, so after this month we'll be shopping around for a new committee member. If anybody is interested or you know somebody who might be interested in the committee, let me know. Like I said, it's a really fun experience, and it really doesn't require more than a couple of hours of your time each year. It's not a huge time commitment.
We do our call for nominations during the fall, park service consolidated awards call, so sometime in usually it's November, early December when that awards call comes out, and the John L. Cotter Award is part of that call. Like I mentioned, there's two categories. There's a projects category and a career category for this award. The committee receives the nominations. We have a series of criteria that we use to evaluate the nominations, and each committee member individually reviews all the nominations after we get them all. Then we come together as a committee, and we compare our scores, and we talk about each of the nominations. Then we make a selection in association with Stan Bond to decide who the awardee should be. Usually by early spring, by March, we're able to get through that process, and then announce who the winners are.
This year, as Karen mentioned, Jeanne Schaaf is our awardee for the distinguished career, and we're going to hear from Jeanne today. I'm really looking forward to the presentation. Katherine Birmingham was the winner of our project award for her work on the project the "Archeological Investigation of L'Hermitage Slave Village." Congratulations to both Jeanne and Katherine, and I think we're going to be hearing from Katherine in one of our next presentations. Congratulations to the two of those folks.
I don't know if you guys have any questions about the Cotter Award committee, but I could take a a question or two, and then we'll jump into Jeanne's presentation. All right, thanks, you guys. Remember, if you're interested in becoming a member of the committee, just let me know because we're going to have a space opening up. Thanks. I'm going to turn it back over to Karen, I believe. Karen?
Karen: Sorry guys. I was on mute. Thank you very much Cari. We're so honored to have Jeanne with us today to talk about her career, and I've asked Jennifer Peterson Weinberger if she'll introduce Jeanne. Jennifer?
Jennifer: Thank you. It is my privilege to introduce Dr. Jeanne Schaaf as an archeologist who has shaped the discipline and advanced the understanding of past human behavior in Alaska. She's mentored numerous students in becoming an archeologist or an anthropologist or other cultural resource professionals, and she'd advocated tirelessly for the preservation, protection, and stewardship of cultural resources in Alaska. Dr. Jeanne Schaaf’s distinguished 30 year career as a National Park Service archeologist and cultural resource program manager reflects her passion for conducting high quality cultural resource research and disseminating the research results to the public. Her long list of contributions include many highlights.
I'm just going to briefly mention a few that I think you'll see in her presentation in a couple minutes. Jeanne's first position in the National Park Service Alaska Region was as a lithic analyst in the 1980s, and her work led to her selection as a project leader for the Bering Land Bridge archeological sites inventory project, a survey of an extremely remote, wild arctic preserve. Here, she recognized that environmental changes were actively eroding coastal archeological sites. Her collaborations with Alaskan native experts like Gideon Barr and scientists like David Hopkins fostered numerous field studies and publications.
In 1989, Jeanne worked with the regional section 106 compliance officer on issues associated with the Exxon Valdez oil spill. She was also a part of the American team that put together the Beringian Heritage Reconnaissance study that led to the resolution by Gorbachev and Bush should work towards an international protected area between the United States and Russia. In 1995, she created a joint cultural resource program for four park units in Alaska, and those are Katmai, Lake Clark, Aniakchak, and Alagnak and created a curatorial and research facility for these parks.
Her readiness to collaborate allowed her to form partnerships with researchers in diverse fields and led to numerous scientific contributions in the areas of Quaternary geology, paleobotany, entomology, paleoecology, marine ecology, and issues related to climate and sea level change. Consultations with Alaskan natives concerning NAGPRA on Mink Island, which is a small island in Amalik Bay, led to Jeanne documenting an occupation beginning as early as 7,200 years ago. This work added new information to understand the lives and adaptations of the first people to establish permanent settlements on the Gulf of Alaska. Recognizing the brief opportunity to survey perennial ice patches before their loss due to global warming, Jeanne formed a partnership with Dr. James Dixon of the University of New Mexico to use GIS models to survey and recover perishable hunting tools from ice patches at Lake Clark.
More of her contributions included working with a professional conservator to produce a site management plan for pictograph sites on the Lake Clark coast. These are the only known pictographs on NPS lands in Alaska. As part of the project, Jeanne also recruited Dr. Brian Fagan to visit the sites and write a publication called "Where We Found a Whale" to place the site into a worldwide cultural context. In addition, she established the Lake Clark ethnography program to allow Dena'ina people to present their culture from their perspective. Working with linguists, a musicologist, a cultural anthropologist, and elders, Jeanne fostered productions of place name maps and dictionaries, ethno-geographies, ethno-histories, ethnologies, and compilations of elder knowledge. Jeanne also relocated several late prehistoric settlements based on this work.
Jeanne also initiated the first cultural resource surveys in Aniakchak, which is one of the most logistically challenging parks in Alaska. Ethnographic surveys in nearby villages gained understanding of the people and their culture and created active partnerships. The initial archeological survey recovered information on a settlement of the Alaska Peninsula and the north-south movements of people in the past.
In all that she has done, Jeanne made sure to involve local people in projects and disseminate information to the tribes, local communities, and the public. Jeanne has very positive relationships with small communities associated with these parks fostered by respect, understanding, outreach, education, and trust. Her work under a cooperative agreement with the Nondalton tribe for carrying out archeological research was in the Kijik NHL is just one example. In all, Jeanne produced over 40 publications and four movies for the public including attractive books that bring history to life and foster appreciation of the park’s significant cultural resources. With all she has done and continues to do, it is with passion, hard work, and genuine humility that in and of itself make it a leader we can all learn from. It is now my pleasure to introduce Dr. Jeanne Schaaf.
Jeanne: Thank you. I'm really grateful to have had the opportunity to work with and for so many people who embrace cultural resources and saw cultural resources as fully part of the NPS mission. Also, there are people sitting at the table here with me whose work it is that I am receiving credit for. It's impossible in this presentation to cover the 30 years and spectacular resources that we have in these parks and to thank so many people and cooperators who work with us and tribes, being so interested in cooperating with us to understand these resources.
Let's see. These projects, some of them were mentioned in the nomination, and I thought I would just briefly go over them. I wanted to highlight them because, not only I think that they did contribute a lot to our knowledge of prehistory, but they also just - we barely scratched the surface, and we really need to do more, and we are doing more, thankfully, depending on cultural resource preservation program funding, which is so essential for us doing our work here in Alaska. It's just been critical, and we thank the agency in the Washington Office for the program. Karen did say I could take as long as I wanted to cover 30 years but don't be scared. I'm just going talk. I think what I don't get done, perhaps, Karen, you would consider having a webinar by some of the people directly involved in this research still to really do justice to these projects.
Karen: Absolutely. We could do a whole series devoted to Alaska.
Jeanne: That would be wonderful. There's just amazing stuff happening here. Bering Land Bridge is here. Can every-
Karen: Jeanne, you have to share your laptop with us. You go up to content in the corner. Do you see that?
Jeanne: Yeah.
Karen: You want to click on that.
Female: Then click on share.
Jeanne: Do I click on September 11-
Karen: No, you want to click on share, and then share your desktop.
Jeanne: Selected area or all? All.
Karen: All. All looks like it was the right answer. Yep. Now you want to click on from beginning.
Jeanne: I did. It's doing something. Here we go. All right.
Karen: All right. I think you're away.
Jeanne: You can see the cursor?
Karen: Yes.
Jeanne: You can hear me okay?
Karen: Yes. Thank you.
Jeanne: All right, the first project we'll discuss is up here in the northern part of the Seward Peninsula, Alaska. Then next we'll jump to Katmai and Lake Clark, and we might make it to Bristol Bay here, the Walrus Island game sanctuary and probably we'll defer some things, just depending on how we're hanging in there. I, too, read up on John Cotter just to see who he was, and this quote from him represents how I feel as well as I look back over the wonderful experiences that I had.
First project, I'm just starting with the good old days. This is where my love affair with NPS, the parks, and the mission and the resources started in 1985 when I was hired to lead an archeological survey in this land. Directly from this survey led to about nine years of various, assorted research projects that built upon what we learned here in this project, including my own dissertation that I'm going to talk a little bit about.
The 2.7 million acre preserve was set aside, not for scenic wonders, but for the scientific value of this place as preserving a remnant of the Bering Land Bridge. The unit was established for science, which just excites the heck out of me. I think that was just a brilliant thing to do, and the designation, in part, was an outgrowth of geologist Dave Hopkins' prior work in studying the Land Bridge and working in this very area. He imparted knowledge to the park planners in the '70s and was instrumental in getting this unit established. This is part of our '96 crew, Dale Vincent, Jim Jordan, Kim Ningulek from Shishmaref, and Nathan off screen. Dave Hopkins joined us this year for two weeks in the field. He hadn't been out there for health reasons for 20 or more years, and this two week stint got him back involved. He recruited a number of scientists and graduate students who then spent the next several years studying various aspects of the paleoecology of the area. It's really pretty productive.
Back in these days, like I called them the good old days, there were no radio repeaters, no radios, no sat phones, no way out except every two weeks we had a scheduled camp move. Hopefully, a plane would come from Nome or the Fire Pro helicopter would come and move our camp weather permitting. I carried around a little ammo can with an IV bag and some emergency medical supplies because there would be no one to come if someone got into trouble. Health, life, and safety were important elements of our job competency, but they didn't override the main focus of learning about the resource.
We had some previous archeological work in the area and a great deal of ethnohistorical data compiled by a couple of very obsessive ethnographers, Dorothy Jean Ray and Tiger Burch who worked in the area. Also, Gideon Halif Barr who was born in a remote part of the preserve, Cape Espenberg, worked with us very closely. He had also worked with Hopkins in the '40s and was his boat operator then. Dave told me if I'd been born in Shishmaref I would be a man very much like Gideon. Gideon was very interested in everything we were doing and imparted a lot of knowledge.
This is the site Ublasaun where Gideon lived as a young boy, and he worked with historical architect Jim Creech to do the first detailed documentation of native architecture in the state.
This is Charlie Lucier who excavated at Trail Creek Caves, which is in this preserve, and it's one of the few early Holocene sites up there, 10,000 years or so old. This is Dave Hopkins. We brought Charlie out to help us identify which caves had been tested, what chambers were excavated, and so forth. There were some pretty good secrets there. This is a screen left from Helge Larson's 1950 excavation there, so that's part of the site now, too. We found trowels and all kinds of chocolate tins and so forth. I better move on.
There are many features that make Bering Land Bridge or BELA, as I'll refer to it in the future - an outstanding, unique, and wondrous place. This is a false color aerial photograph of part of the preserve. You can see the thaw lakes that form in the permafrost. They intersect and melt, leaving these craters. These are volcanic maar lakes. You don't often think of of the Seward peninsula in association with volcanics, but this area has five former shield volcanoes, five large maar lakes, which are water filled, rimless craters formed by steam - rich eruptions through the permafrost. Various eruptions in the past have deposited tephras over an area of 1,000 square kilometers here. The most recent eruption formed the North Devil Mountain Lake. That occurred about 10,000 years ago. There's also a very extensive lava flow called the Lost Jim Flow named by Dave Hopkins on the Imuruk Plateau that occurred 2,000 years ago, and it's recorded in local legends.
There he is, the man himself. One of these eruption that I just mentioned occurred about 17,000 years ago and dumped about three meters of ash instantly across the landscape. What you see here that's being eroded out along the shores of the thaw lakes that you saw is a 17,000 year old vegetated surface, and the snow that was on that surface had never melted. It is the coolest thing! In this surface - and some of Dave's and his colleagues' students did analyze this - they find microtine scats, insects, and so forth, but it's tufted vegetation at the coldest part of the last glacial period.
This is the refugium and directly addresses an Arctic desert - Was it a polar desert or an Arctic steppe? I remember, though, Dave thinking as he was looking at it, he said, "Seems like a mammoth would have a hard time making a living here." I do believe that researchers at UAF are very interested in pursuing this because this is a unique resource that definitely is threatened by global warming. The melting of these lakes, it's going to go fast, and as far as I know, nowhere else in the world can you do an actual vegetation swab of something 17,000 years old. That's really cool. Anyway, I better move on.
On our survey, we mapped hundreds, 493 house pits to be exact, and this is a shot, an aerial shot of Cape Espenberg. The coast of the Bering Land Bridge is eroding mostly. Huge, huge just chunks of land and sites just calving off onto the beach because they sit on permafrost. In this area, the land is actually accreting and you see ridges formed through time and then swales in between. It's a really fragile ecosystem too, and it's held up totally by permafrost. It's an important bird nesting area, and so, this, too, is threatened by melting of the permafrost. You see the little dimples on the ridges, and these are outlines of late prehistoric house depressions. There are earlier depressions on the older ridges that aren't in this slide.
Just to show you what these look like when they're mapped, generally, there's a large main room for the house, a long entry tunnel, and then various side rooms off the main tunnel. Sometimes a storm shed at the entryway of the tunnel is shared by houses. The cool thing about this area is it's treeless, and you can see things. You can actually get a general idea about features not having to excavate those. Of course, on this survey, we were moving fast, and we couldn't excavate. We have a few radio carbon dates that we were able to get by limited testing or pull out of exposures, natural exposures, and that sort of thing.
That type of house, semi-subterranean house with a storm shed entryway was used into the early 20th century. There's tremendous cultural continuity here.
Some of the later research that stemmed from this survey was based on ethnographic work done by two people. Dorothy Jean Ray studied the Seward Peninsula and Tiger Burch studied the Kotzebue Sound area. They were interviewing people in the '60s who were elders who were remembering what their parents told them, and so periods into the 1800s where they reconstructed these tribes, as Dorothy called them, or nations, as Burch called them, that were in existence in the 19th century, in the 1800s. They described six to seven Inupiaq and four Yupik societies that were thought to have inhabited the area. Here's where their research overlapped, and of course, they disagreed. Dorothy Jean felt that this area with Cape Espenberg belonged to the Tapqagmiut and Tiger Burch put them with the Kotzebue Sound Malimiut speakers.
What they said about these 19th century societies was that they were characterized by a distinct group name, a discreet territory, a distinct dialect, high level of endogamy, a distinct seasonal round, and a material culture distinct in some detail of structure or ornamentation. Most of these things aren't accessible to us as archeologists a few hundred years later because they're not preserved, of course, in the archeological record. The existence of these societies had never been documented materially, and so I spoke to the challenge of doing that.
What I decided to do was analyze settlement patterns and look for material culture patterns that would provide insight into these societies. I focused on the late prehistoric period from AD 1500 to 1850. I wanted to see if we could see these societies in the late prehistoric archeological record that we had recorded on our survey. I chose to focus on two of the 19th century societies' characteristics, evidence of discreet territory and material culture differences that would be manifested by distinct house type. How you build your house is a cultural template I believe. Remember, I was using mostly survey data with little excavation data, but the archeological record here is dominated by late prehistoric winter settlements, like I showed you in a previous slide.
As Burch said, the 19th century Inupiaq societies maintained territories centered on a drainage system of major rivers, and during winter when warfare and raiding were common, virtually all of a society members could be found within their own territory at settlements located near the core of the territory relative to fishing inland and sealing at the coast. Therefore, the known archeological record dominated as it is by late prehistoric winter settlements lends itself well to comparison with these supposed nations. Looking at house form, it's unknown how long these societies existed before their demise, but the demise began in the late 1830s and was complete by the end of the 19th century.
Gideon's father was born in the 1880s, and so he was a young man, perhaps, so he was a very good informant. He taught Gideon. Gideon remembered being pulled out of school. He said, "Just when I was getting interested in learning this stuff, my dad comes in, he taps me on the shoulder, and he says, 'Son, you won't learn how to survive here. You're coming with me.'" Gideon had this lifelong passion to remember traditional techniques and things.
I wanted to say, too, that this was a very isolated area, and the first direct European contact was the voyage of Otto von Kotzebue in 1816. This is a drawing by Louis Charis who was on Kotzebue's crew. It's of Kotzebue Natives in this very area that they encountered in 1816.
Really briefly, this is my classification of late prehistoric house types based on excavated house form. They're distinguished by the presence or absence of entryways and storm sheds, the length of the entryway, then the construction material. I found very marked distinction between house forms and maybe that's a subject of another presentation, because we need to move on.
This is what these house forms may look like. This is an excavated one from Cape Krusenstern. You can see that they're very labor intensive. This is a driftwood area. There had to be floor planks, wall and ceiling planks all hand hewn. It's a lot of effort. Why build this way if you can get by with a five foot long tunnel in the same environment, which we also have in a certain area here associated, I think, with the Malimiut speakers? Thus, I concluded that we could see some of these distinct cultures in the house form record there. Anyways, that's a long story, but we're going to move on.
A second line of evidence for the occupation of this area by distinct cultural groups is a marked discontinuity in the settlement pattern in the Imuruk Lava Plateau as shown here. There's a bunch of atypical sites that I don't think they exist anywhere in the Arctic archeological record, perhaps because there aren't cinder cones like here. There are several cinder cones in the area, and in late prehistory, substantial villages with up to 25 houses in one case are on top of these cones. Now, Burch and Ray said that seven houses in a village constituted a large village, but 25?
There are also many other features, storage features and stuff here that indicate something was interesting going on. They're associated with massive stone monuments. You can see some of them. I'll show you more later. Common to all the other coastal interior houses in the study area except these stone houses on the cinder cones is immediate proximity to fresh water sources. I concluded these villages were occupied in winter, and remember, winter was when raiding and warfare. They're very defensible positions, and you can also defend your stores. Instead of traveling by dog team to get your stored and cached meat, you had it right there with you, unavailable to raiders.
Here's some of the examples of the monumental architecture that co-occurs with these cinder cone villages. These happen to be at a place called Twin Calderas on Kuzitrin Lake. They're probably territorial symbols. You can see the edge of the caldera here. These calderas make a nice natural caribou corral, and I'm sure that they were used for that. Anyway, you get the idea of these well -built monumental structures. This is where four of those nations' territory boundaries converged. It's a very rich resource area, and we documented that archeologically. Ray states that the Koyuk River People to the east aggressively coveted this area, which was likewise aggressively defended by the occupants as Kuzitrin Lake was the headwaters of the west flowing Kuzitrin River, an extremely important place for fish and caribou procurement. This is where the monuments are the most concentrated and elaborate.
Then a few years ago, Mike Holt, the archeologist for the Northwest Park, asked me to help him document - visit these sites we recorded in [19]85 - for condition assessment and better mapping. We were coming down the slope of a caldera late one night. It was raining. We were cold and wet, and it was dark. I just froze in my tracks because I saw a cairn that was in human form, and we didn't see that in '85. Went back the next day to record it in the sunlight, you see its head, here's its arms, here's another arm, here's the body cavity. It's looking at us. I can't tell you what a powerful image it was, and a little ways away from it is a large triangular slab that's in a mound that's been placed upright. They both point to the east. Remember the direction of the invaders.
Anyway, cairns in human likeness have not been recorded from the western Arctic. They're common in the Canadian Arctic but not here. There's a story to be told here, and there's definitely a National Historic Landmark District nomination to be written. It's just way cool. What time is it? Ooh. We're going to go to Katmai next and look at some research there. Are you guys ...
We worked for four seasons on a little island bordering Shelikof Strait, and we named the island Mink Island because of all the little weasels that were running around looking at us every day and playing on our tents at night and running under the tent floor. Anyway, we gave it that name. We undertook testing here at this site as opposed to all of the other eroding sites along this coast because it clearly is a yardstick site with a rare long-term and nearly continuous occupation in a very rich bay. Professor Don Dumond recorded this site with his fellow University of Oregon archeologists back in the '60s. He came out with me in '96, and we looked around and saw artifacts scattered around the surface that display pretty much every cultural period that had been found in the region and said, "Yeah, we probably should do something about this."
Here's where the site is, and I think I have another slide. The task was huge, so what we did was just focus on the part that I knew would be lost within the next five years, about a three by six excavation area.
Here's a little bit of explanation of the site. There are two middens at the site. The lower midden which is 7,000 to 4,000 years old, and then all of this except for a meter of sterile sand is shell deposited from 2,000 years to 500 years ago when the site was abandoned. You can see some late prehistoric house depressions here. This whole spine, this is all people. People built this, and so when people occupied this, the sea level was a bit lower. Also, they had an unobstructed view of the whole bay. This was not there.
There are also burials, and the dates of the burials are here. These were eroding from this younger component and scattered down the slope. Several had been collected in the '60s, so a part of our work, too, and our reason to be there was that this site was being vandalized, and there were concerns. We worked very closely with the Council of Katmai Descendants on that.
I guess just in the regions ... I lost my cursor. Here's the study area. Anchorage is up in here, so you get there either by plane from Kodiak, boat from Homer, something like that to work. Let’s move on.
Our work at Mink Island led directly to Becky Saleeby writing an NHL nomination for Amalik Bay. Takli island group had long been listed on the national register as an archeological district, but we were able to expand the recognition. I'm going to move on.
Female: Where's Mink Island on that map?
Jeanne: Can I go back? Mink Island is right here.
Karen: Jeanne, take your time. You've got time.
Jeanne: It's almost noon.
Karen: Don't cut into your lunch, whatever you do!
Jeanne: I don't have one. [crosstalk 00:46:15] Please just tell me you guys when you've had enough. Anyway, there's Mink Island. You can see from this, this is a hugely dynamic area and sea level has changed relative to the former occupation. Tsunamis generated by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, high waves and winds from winter storms are really taking big bites out of these cookies. Just to characterize, this is one of the most tectonically active regions on earth, with a great earthquake, which defined as a greater than 7.8 magnitude, occurs once a century, and a giant earthquake, like the '64 quake, occurring once every several hundred or several thousand years. Fall and winter storms are severe with northwest winds prevailing in June. They strike the site from the left, and then winter storms from the south or southeast travel across the open ocean striking the site. The tidal range is nine meters. The highest in the winter months, so combined with those winds, it's very damaging to the site.
The fact that there was something left is pretty phenomenal and the degree - the phenomenal preservation at this site is also pretty astounding. It's only because big bites come out of the edges, but what's left has been pretty much unaltered. It's just amazing. I'll show you some of those slides really quickly.
Let's see, a lot of the site is now in a lag deposit because of sea level changes. This is a big blade core that was found in the lag deposit, and it would fit very nicely in the Anangula assemblage. That site dates in the Aleutian Islands to between 11- and 12,000 years. These are our first people on Mink Island.
We have more than 90 radiocarbon dates from the site, and I took the medians in some major occupations and lined them up with this graph of mean summer temperatures reconstructed for Alaska. You can see major climatic events relative to the establishment of camps and dwellings on this island. Our occupation starts just at the end of the Hypsithermal as temperatures are cooling. I do have some information about the temperature change, but there's a spike, a warm spike that happens to co-occur and I know this is a superficial overlay, but we have a massive occupation. It is a winter house. It's got huge post holes and was used year after year because of the layer caked laminated floor that this had. We don't have another major occupation during this cold period. During this area, the site is abandoned. However, Amalik Bay is not abandoned. There are sites elsewhere, but this particular site gets abandoned for a couple thousand years. People come back during the Medieval Warm Period, and then leave again at the start of the Little Ice Age.
Let's see, in the interest of learning the possible effects of old driftwood, there are no trees, and so there's a huge bank of driftwood on these sites. Wanting to see how this would affect our radio carbon dates, we identified the wood, and then I looked at hardwood, which would be the local shrubs so Birch and alder and willow versus conifers, which have to come in because they still don't grow there. Although, they're getting there, just taking a long time. Basically, there really isn't much of a difference that I could find.
We have got cataloged about 36,000 artifacts, and this is a distribution of some of the major artifact types, red being blades. These are big blades. They actually never disappear throughout the entire sequence. It's kind of interesting and chipped stone tool technology. Purple is when ground slate comes in about 5,400 years ago, which is quite a bit earlier than we originally thought. It tends to dominate the tool industry after that.
I think we have identified a little over 12,000 shells, and our shell has been used for specific isotopic studies later. We've got a species diversity of 25 different shells having been collected by occupants in the lower midden and 18 in the upper midden. The species found most consistently in the excavation are still present in the inter-tidal areas of the site today. However, cockles, soft-shell clam, razor clam, and surf clam are not found at the site today but are nearby in more sheltered and soft substrates.
We have a number of people have helped identify fish and bird and sea mammal bone from the site, at least 250,000 of these have been ... It's a huge undertaking for such a small excavation area, really. I wanted to point out this kind of preservation that we have. This is a 5,000 year old fish pressed into this floor. This is the nature of these deposits. I should get away from these charts and show you the floors.
Since you don't have trees, you don't have root disturbance, we didn't have ice frost jacking of things, all the artifacts are neatly and flatly lying on these beautifully color coded floors. This is our 7,200 year old floor. The first people to come to Mink Island - see it in the profile? That's like two millimeters thick, but it's neat. These pins mark that floor. The piece of it that we have, of course, it's been ripped and torn away. You can see by just the nature of these sediments that they were ... Some turbulence deposited them on top of this floor. Here are two ochre grinding stones in the middle of the floor, some floor structure feature that I don't understand, and over here, we have a sub-floor house pit that yielded a boat shape lamp that, along with the lamp found in Kodiak, might be the oldest two lamps found in North America. Ours maybe has 100 year edge on it, but you know how radio carbon [crosstalk 00:53:34].
The other thing that's left undone is these tools. These Anangula-like blades are encrusted with residue, and so we carefully collected these in foil, and they're still in foil in the curatorial hoping for someone to possibly recover DNA. Wouldn't that be cool? Probably unlikely and also other information from this residue.
Here's the lamp cleaned up. You can see what a beauty it is.
This is another occupation that is on top of that turbulence that I showed you before. It's coincident with the end of that warm period or the hypsithermal interval on the chart earlier. It's the next major occupation directly on top of a ten centimeter thick volcanic ash that fell on the site around 6,600 years ago. There was no soil development on it. This floor was pressed right into the ash, and there's evidence of similar sites in Kodiak. While this event was somewhat big, people didn't stay away. They came right back. They were carving expedient net floats out of pumice and harvesting sea lions. There's a sea lion rookery about three miles away that we could even hear on quiet days when we were excavating. People were definitely hunting here throughout the period of occupation. What else to say about that - that's pretty cool!
This is that winter occupation that I mentioned that - this black floor. We unimaginatively named it the Big Black Floor. That's how it is now known. We were filthy from working in it, but it's this laminated ... Here's a structural feature. Let's see, this dates to about 6,000 BP, and there's a large, it's off screen, but a large pebble filled hearth that heated the place. Lots of stone lamps here. I'm just going to move on.
There was a brief cold period, about a two and half centigrade drop in mean summer temperature after that last occupation followed by this beautiful floor. Also, totally covered in red ocher. This is a timber that fell, and it's actually only like a millimeter thick, but it was just so beautifully preserved you could brush it and clean it off. It was pole-sized. Over here, if you can see my cursor, is the edge of the shallow little shelter that, most likely, was a tent. There are other lines of evidence that indicate that too. There was bone needle manufacture going on. This house is perfectly untouched except for the big bites taken out of it by the erosional things. The actual surface itself was preserved under a very thin tephra fall. I don't know what else to say.
This cultural occupation at that particular part of the site abruptly ceased about 4,000 years ago, and then 2,000 years ago, the massive midden began forming. This was one of the occupations in that younger midden. This is a sea lion rib with a broken flake point driven through it that we found. Associated with this occupation, which is three meters thick, the shell, are the burial remains.
This is Mike Hilton, and this is a piece of that shell midden. Pretty incredible.
Male: Can I ask you a question before you move on? I'm sorry. You were talking about earlier how you saw the habitation changes with the climate changes over time, and you also said you saw like 25 different species of clam shells or stuff like that. Did that change over time? Have you done any research to see if that changed over time?
Jeanne: Yeah, that was one specific question that I did ask Nora Foster, who's a shell expert here in Alaska, to look for. She basically said, "Not really. Not seeing any difference." Darn. Then Gayle Irvine from USGS has spent a lot of time looking at isotopic data in these shells, so we've given her well-dated shells to look at through time. That's maybe the subject of ... They are finding some interesting things with the shell.
About the burials, we had one. The remains of people interred, laid out on driftwood planks that occurred about 900 years ago. Calendar corrected, it'd be more around AD 1450. They were two sub-adults and three small children aged newborn to two and a half years. Then later, an older female was buried in a flexed position in a pit placed immediately above the previous burial. Also, Katmai descendants excavated these burials with me personally, and then they dictated how they would be stored, and also, the elders said that they wanted to learn as much about these people as possible. Subsequently, there's been DNA analyses and direct dating on these remains.
I do apologize for not having more interesting people photos in this, but this was a regular crew member.
This is how we left the site, our little three by six meter excavation cube, in 2000. We covered it with geo textiles, we put sandbags, and we tried to fortify it against the sea.
Here's, again, where our excavation area was.
Then this was 2003, three years later. It pretty much took out most of what we had excavated. We had back filled it, and this is Tim Taylor, who's the erosion control guru at Denali. I brought him out. I expected him to laugh at me because coming from Bering Land Bridge I've seen multi-million dollar sea walls at Shishmaref fail miserably, and they keep rebuilding them. Water always wins. He actually said, "You know, I think there's something we can do." He helped us. We staged, we had to bring materials from Homer and offload them onto a zodiac, and then carry these gabion baskets up the shore. It's in wilderness, so we used all hand tools. We built little ramps and we took wheelbarrows up and took cobbles from the beach, the right side, and built these gabion baskets. We did it in about a week. It was actually fun. It looks horrible, doesn't it?
This is how we left the site, and this is pretty much how it looks now the last time we revisited it because, really, it doesn't take direct hits. It gets run up. This is where the direct hit of the waves hit, and then it's splash and run up that's continually eating away at the site. For now, it's working.
Here we go to Lake Clark if you're still hanging with me. Ice patch and global warming has ... Let's see, this is ... Sorry. Global warming attached the new discipline of archeology called ice patch archeology, and these are perennially frozen areas of snow and ice that generally lie on shaded sides of mountains. Caribou and other animals regularly seek to escape insects by retreating to these high patches of snow and ice, and they've done so for thousands of years. Ancient people hunted them there.
Since the discovery of thick caribou dung deposits melting from Canadian Yukon ice patches in 1997 and the discovery of arrows and dart shafts among a host of other rare organic artifacts in this dung, archeologists over the world have begun to search for these patches to save the rare artifacts they may release as they melt. In 2008, we teamed up with Jim Dixon at the University of New Mexico and the National Science Foundation Polar Program to join this race to search for ice patch sites in Lake Clark in the Dena'ina homeland before they disappeared completely. Here’s a couple of random ice patches that we found.
We finally found some prehistoric organic artifacts, miraculously. Antler arrow points melting from two ancient ice patches on a very special place in Dena'ina territory on the flanks of Telaquana Mountain, which is a very commanding and powerful place. It's where a rare mythic Dena'ina place name attaches to this place of time of starvation, a shaman going, camping on the rock, and the animals coming out. Linguist James Carey sees this as actually an origin myth.
Here's George Alexi from the Nondalton tribe helping us with our survey. Here is Telaquana Mountain - a formidable place, sorry, can't see beneath, with hanging glaciers. These ice patches are right alongside of it. Let me see where Telaquana Mountain ... Between Turquoise Lake, it's up in here. It's here. Right here. Here is a major historic Dena'ina trail that goes right by these ice patch sites called Telaquana Trail. Here's some of the scenery from that trail looking up into the flanks of Telaquana Mountain.
We were fortunate to find these arrow points that had just melted from this ancient ice, and the radio carbon date is shown there. This is just four sides of the same point. This wouldn't have lasted long out in the open. These disappear, just like that.
Then over here, in the distance here, are two other patches where these points were recovered. These little dots are where Jim drilled out material for the radio carbon date. This surprised us that we would have 2,000 year old point there. I suggest, based on the continuity and the pattern of use of these out of the way sites and the similarity in the form and function of the artifacts that we found, that these were Dena'ina hunters using these ice patches on the flanks of a very powerful and significant place. Not only 150 years ago, as the one arrow is, but 2,000 years ago. This is significant for us because, in the past, we've only been securely able to see Dena'ina in the house depressions left at the Kijik National Historic Landmark. Clearly, those are the same house forms back 900 years, so roughly 1,000 years, so I would argue the Dena'ina were up here using bow and arrow, which is also too early for bow and arrow to have been in this area according to data elsewhere. It has all kinds of implications.
In August of 2013, Dael Davenport and others joined me, and we went up to survey to see the condition of the patch, see if there were any artifacts, and one patch was completely gone. It's just gone now. However, eroding from the last remaining ancient ice that we know of, is caribou dung. I certainly hope people get in there and figure out to collect from that because that has all kinds of implications for caribou population research.
Now we're transitioning to the coast of Lake Clark, and this is Tuxedni Bay. It's the location of one of two rock painting sites that we know of in the Alaska regional National Park system, and the site is right over here. This is at the granite rock face. There are about 25 figures. A few of them are illustrated here, and we spent several years with geologists and lichenologists and a conservator, not only documenting the site and doing research, but tracing down collections from 1932. Somewhat of an excavation at the base of the rock shelter by Fredrica De Laguna and trying to figure out how to preserve these sites. This is just the drawing to show you what the panels look like.
This is the other location of the older rock art site in Clam Cove at the other end of the coast of Lake Clark. Jennifer mentioned that Brian Fagan was enlisted to write a book about the prehistory of Alaska, and I did that because, number one, he's written extensively about rock art globally, but also, in my experience, people think prehistoric peoples were rather primitive, and they were all about finding a comfortable place to camp and having some meat. They lived in complex societies. They were complicated politically and spiritually. When you approach prehistory through art and these concepts with amazing drawings of features and their spirit helpers, I think it gives people an idea, an unspoken idea that these people were about a lot more than just what they ate, if that makes any sense.
As soon as we got Fagan here, he noticed the alignment of the rock art with the peaks behind it. It's tucked back in here, and over the years, sometimes the beach sand, depending upon winter storms, is high. We looked at old historic photos to try to reconstruct what was happening with this site and how the images were being degraded. This is just a drawing of some of the images. There’s a boat.
Basically, some of the main actions affecting this site is just the formation of this black crust. It's salt, pops off, and takes the painting with it, and then water run off here. There's also major cracks and vegetation forming. I'm not sure what my next slide is.
This is the 1969 excavation of everything around the rock shelter. Joan Townsend did this in 1969, and we tracked down her collection and ran a radio carbon date. The associated date is 1,700 years, but that doesn't necessarily mean the paintings were painted then. Fagan's conclusion was is that these were original sites. These weren't just graffiti places anybody could write on, that the shamans and powerful people gathered there before hunts. You'll notice the big boats, and they figure prominently in both, for rituals to ensure a successful, safe hunt.
This is, again, with the naked eye, the pictograph, the painting. This is an enhanced ... No, I think that's coming up next. You can see how complicated these are, and it's very difficult to see. Here you go. With the fine imagery that we acquired for the site, we're able to actually see a lot more of what's going on there.
Here is Dr. Fagan. Here's Karen and the folks in Nondalton where he met and gave a presentation about this. Probably lots more to say about that, but I want to move on. This is the book.
This is also in Tuxedni Bay, and I bring this up because we've recently been able to do some testing at a village site on this island, called Magnetic Island. It's not an island, but it was in the past. This occupation is pretty interesting, and it dates, let's see, about 3,500 to 3,800 years old. That's the oldest dated site on the coast of Lake Clark, and its artifacts suggest that it's Arctic Small Tool, which is also not recorded from there. This is new, and it's also capped by [mount] Redoubt ash that probably led to the abandonment of this area by these people. Let's see, I think I have a …
Magnetic Island is here. The pictographs are here, and this is just a map of glaciation. Was the pictograph site accessible to these folks because a lot of red ocher was found in this site? It's tempting to me to say, "Did they have anything to do with this site?" It's hard to make that connection. This is the extent of the 12,000 - year glaciation over to here. For the last 12,000 years, this site would have been open. The bay would have been open and available to people to travel up the bay. This bay, too, I want to say, has never had an archeological survey. We do need to do a lot more work in this area. It's pretty cool.
Shall I continue?
Female: Yeah.
Jeanne: Okay. Now, going to Bristol Bay, and this is not a national park or preserve. It's a state game sanctuary, but it's a national natural landmark. Their manager at the time had worked in Katmai and knew about Section 106 compliance, and they badly needed a new outhouse. He wanted an archeological survey. The state archeologist couldn't do it because there was no money. The game refuge would have had to pay their salaries for them to go out and find a place for a new outhouse. [crosstalk 01:14:26]
This sanctuary is just amazingly rich, and was the haul-out for tens of thousands of walrus, and it has been for, apparently, a long time, which I will show you next. The village of Togiak on the mainland is very closely associated with this site. They hunted walrus here traditionally, but when the sanctuary was established in 1960, it became off limits for hunting. They began open boat hunting and losing the walrus and couldn't pass on this cultural tradition. In the '90s, they were again able to hunt here, so in October, they come and hunt there. I was trying to get to a slide that really got me excited about ...
Here, this one. Back to needing an inventory, Judy Alderson, who was head of the NNL program here, sent me this slide, and she said, "They want a new outhouse." I looked at it, and I saw all these house depressions. We were like, "Oh my God." What we did was, in late May, over a holiday weekend, we volunteered, Judy and I, to go have a look and map these sites, and then try to find a place that would not disturb. We did do that, and in the end, we mapped about 105 features. We rerouted trails, so we didn't go through house pits because in the wind there, everything they do is in a house pit because it's out of the wind. Their tent platforms are in house pits, their burn barrel's in a house pit because if you go off site you get into wet stuff or you get into slopes.
Anyway, 105 features, and our oldest radio carbon date is about 6,000 years old, which is about 3,000 years older than anything we thought existed on the coast in Bristol Bay before. There were interior hunters there quite long ago in the Ahklun Mountains, Steen Mountain, Bob Ackerman's recorded site that are early Holocene sites and Northern Archaic is there 7,000 years ago, but here on this island, over 20 miles off shore, people didn't have boats. What?
Anyway, this is what one of those 2,000 to 2,500 year old house pits look like. Here's the burn barrel. Behind the burn barrel, walrus tusk and skull. Picked up a radio carbon date there of about 2,300 years. They moved the barrel. They were really, really wanting to protect these resources, and actually, for the little damage that was done, this island among all the islands in the group is the only unlooted island. There's wholesale looting going on in this island group. There has been since the '80s when Bob Shaw was there.
They had this garden that they had excavated in the '70s, a big rectangular garden. They said, "We could put the outhouse there because it's already been messed up." So, we put in a one by one. Let's see if it's all messed up. You can see here, I'm going to trace the messed up part. This has been turned and sealed, and of course, it's got artifacts in it because, as it turns out, they took out a Norton house for sure. Underneath here, these densely laminated deposits are intact - an archeologist's dream. On the floor, on sterile, is part of a walrus skull, a broken lance point, and at this arrow tip, was a big hunk of charcoal, and that's where our 6,000 year old date came. We know people were hunting walrus there 6,000 years ago. Pretty cool. We've since gone back and done some more work for additional needs that they had and have confirmed those dates.
Another interesting occupation that is new to us there is Arctic Small Tool folks being on the island, nabbing walrus 3,000 years ago. This is a real greasy black. It's a living surface here and our date of 3,300 years there. This is a classic Arctic Small Tool site blade. Oops. I kind of went too soon, but I wanted to say something. That is, if you remember the previous map with lower sea levels, this is not that big of a stretch from Ugashik Narrows, which is near Katmai on the Alaska Peninsula. Ugashik Narrows is an old site. To say, it's 9- or 10,000 years BP, and I think the connections here are here with Round Island. I'd say it's very likely we will find older deposits on Round Island.
Another cool thing is that while these people were hunting walrus 6,000 years ago on Round Island there were still mammoths surviving on the Pribilof Islands. That was way too far away. Obviously, they wouldn't have survived if they had known about them.
Then this was the last area I wanted to talk about. I didn't want to forget Aniakchak, and there's been a tremendous amount of work done there by Richard Vanderhook. Based on his discovery, Brian Hoffman has done data recovery there, and he is finishing his final report right now. Richard Vanderhook came up with this graphic. 3,400 years ago, this is the immediate devastation zone. This is the 1912 Katmai eruption, which we call the largest eruption in the 20th century. This created what Richard called a dead zone for a long time. Sure enough, we don't see people for, I think, it was about 2,000 years after. Maybe 1800 years after. This also happens to be a dividing line between different language speakers as people were encountered. He's been exploring this question for quite a long time and did his dissertation on it.
I just wanted to put this in so you could see. This is the history of Aniakchak. These are all tephras, and that 3,400 BP one is up here. It's a pretty amazing place. I would really hope that we could enlist Richard or Hoffman to give an entire webinar on this. That's it. How bad are we? 11:00, 12:30.
Another Cotter quote. He was a master of understatements from what I read. I think we will live long enough to see things because of the archeologists still working, Dale Vincent, Jeff Rasic, Michelle Jesperson, Jennifer Pederson Weinberger, all these people who are ... There's many others that I would love to mention. CB Gilbert, but I'm going to be quiet because time to stop.
Karen: Jeanne, that was a wonderful presentation. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing all of the field work that you've done over the past 30 years.
Jeanne: Or a little portion anyway.
Karen: Yes. Do people have any questions for Jeanne?
Female: [inaudible 01:22:23] that ocher on the floor?
Jeanne: It has certain waterproofing properties, but red ocher's been used ... It's found in Africa at sites that are like a quarter of a million years old, and it was a paint. It meant a lot of things. To me, if you cover your entire floor with it, it means something more than just I want a waterproof hide here. I think it means something, a protected space, a meaningful space as many cultures around the world do.
Karen: What do you think the black material was?
Jeanne: Charcoal.
Karen: Charcoal on the floor.
Jeanne: Just charcoal.
Male: Was it spread on the ground?
Jeanne: On their feet. They'd track it all over the place because the floor was laminated like a sugar wafer, thin, couple millimeters thick lamination of black and then white sand. Just real thin because it's compressed, and it has the overburden of the later occupations built on top of it. Everything is squeezed. I think they went away, came back, and dust blew in, sand blew in, so you see. I think it's tracking because they had these huge pebble hearths just full of charcoal. They probably were smeary with it.
Female: [inaudible 01:23:58]
Jeanne: I don't know if you heard. Janet was asking if there was a summary of the meaning of the pictographs. This is the problem with not being able to name everyone and everything, but we worked closely with Madonna Moss at the University of Oregon. Her graduate student Melissa Baird was charged with doing a circumpolar analysis of symbolism in art, any kind of art, and she wrote her dissertation on that and also published an article in Arctic Anthropology. The symbolism probably represents, like the boats, hunting. Hunting a large whale, not a beluga whale, which is also something interesting to pursue in that area. Also, some images like a shaman image that also occurs. I think it's at Siberian sites with a hole in the stomach. There are transformation images. You see spirits. I don't know. Images. It's just hard to know. We really tried to examine things to see were these painted over, were they added to, can you see distinct groups where different periods of time, certain symbols may have been added. We didn't really discern anything like that. I'll give you the references.
Female: You can't stop. You have to keep working, right?
Jeanne: There are so many other people like I started to name them all, and I will continue if you like. They are doing incredible things. Thank you.
Male: That's really good work.
Female: Thank you for all of your contributions.
Jeanne: Thank you. Totally fun. That was the fun part.
Female: It's incredible how many really great archeologists and anthropologists that you've worked with. How long would it take?
Jeanne: If I could just call out the BIA people, we have really cool stuff going on, and people in southeast, Theresa Thibault. Keep it up guys.
Karen: Jeanne, what are you working on in your retirement?
Jeanne: Because archeology fed my soul as I was manager and managing and how I worked with contracting and cooperative agreements and these things, I'm working now with Jennifer to complete a backlog. For example, to write a professional report of the Mink Island excavation and the Round Island testing for the state. I have a pile of artifacts that I'm joyfully working on and doing nothing else. That'll take me about a year I think.
Female: Okay. Good.
Female: Jeanne retired in February, and now she's a rehired annuitant for the park service. [crosstalk 01:27:20]
Karen: She must have snuck out because I looked to see if there was an announcement on Inside NPS, and I didn't see anything.
Female: Except for today. She's back, so we're all happy.
Karen: Absolutely. [crosstalk 01:27:36]
Jeanne: I got to tell you, retirement's pretty awesome.
Karen: If there's no other questions, I'm going to stop the recording.
Description
Jeanne Schaaf, 9/11/2014, ArcheoThursday
Duration
1 hour, 8 minutes, 52 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
09/11/2014
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