The first artifact — a wooden mask — was discovered in 2007 by a child who stumbled upon it while playing on the beach near his home in Quinhagak, a village in western Alaska that sits by the Bering Sea. Over the following months, hundreds of similar objects — baskets, finely carved harpoon shafts, lip plugs, wooden dolls, ivory tattoo needles — emerged from the earth as melting permafrost and erosion driven by climate change revealed a Yupik Eskimo settlement dating back to the 1600s.
Today, more than a decade after the first find, an extraordinary collection of some 100,000 prehistoric Yupik artifacts — the largest such collection in the world — sits in a small newly opened museum in Quinhagak, home to an indigenous community of about 700 people.
“This is by far the highlight of everything I’ve ever excavated in my 40-year-career — and I’ve worked on some pretty spectacular sites,” said Rick Knecht, an archaeologist with the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. For the past 10 years Knecht has led a team racing to save as many items as possible at the excavation site about three miles (4.8 kilometers) from Quinhagak and dubbed Nunalleq, which means Old Village in the Yupik language.
“Almost everything we know about Yupik prehistory comes from this site,” said Knecht, an affable man with a grizzled beard, as he surveyed the area recently with an AFP team.
“If we’d lost it, the people here would have lost their past and a tangible link to that past, which would have been an unbelievable tragedy.”
Race against the elements
But while Knecht marvels at the trove of artifacts discovered at Nunalleq and the clues these objects have provided to traditional Yupik culture, he is also horrified that similar sites across Alaska are probably disappearing as the frozen ground that has preserved them for centuries thaws and erosion sweeps them away.
“As the permafrost melts, you can see that the soil liquefies. It’s like a box of ice cream,” Knecht said, pointing to the gooey mud along the fast-eroding shoreline in Quinhagak and large clumps of earth ready to topple into the sea.