Technical ReportPDF Available

Calibrating 55 Years of Radiocarbon Dates from Labrador

May 2024

Report number: Arctic Studies Center Newsletter 31: 45-46
Affiliation: Smithsonian Institution

Authors:

Smithsonian Institution

Short article on pp. 45-46 of the Smithsonian Institution's Arctic Studies Center's Newsletter for 2024 on a project to calibrate and systematize more than 400 radiocarbon dates obtained over the course of 50 years from archaeological sites in Labrador and Newfoundland by researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and their colleagues. The report focuses in on Bayesian analysis of the calibrated radiocarbon dates from Thule/Ancestral Inuit sites in Labrador to reconsider evidence for the timing of the arrival of Ancestral Inuit on the coast of Labrador in the late 12th century and for their expansion southwards along the coast to the Gulf of St. Lawrence by the 15th century AD.

Content uploaded by Kevin P. Smith

Content may be subject to copyright.

Newsletter

Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History

May 2024

NOTES FROM THE DIRECTOR

By William W. Fitzhugh

Settling in after COVID-19 turned the past year into

a learning experience we had not imagined. Nancy

Shorey and I returned to nd most colleagues working

from home more than in their oces, meetings and

most lectures and events hybrid, and there were many

changes in administrative procedures—usually ever

more remote and complicated. Nevertheless, those

of us in the Recovering

Voices, Asia, and Arctic

programs chugged on

and had an interesting

and productive year.

Highlights at the Museum

include a year under the

Department chairmanship

of Rick Potts, who turned

over the reins to Josh

Bell in January ’24; the

retirements of Laurie

Burgess and Bill Billeck;

and appointments of

Dorothy Lippert as head

of the Repatriation Oce

and Celia Emmelhainz

as head of NAA/Archives,

and Matt Sanger and Marissa Shaver joined the

Repatriation Oce as Tribal Liaison ocers; however,

losses to curator ranks continue.

Museum Anthropology—and museums in general—are

facing major challenges that have been accelerated

by the brooding surge emerging from covid. National

discussions about the stewardship of collections and

institutional responsibilities to interest groups and

descendant communities, ranging far beyond issues

of graves and sacred objects, are engaging museum

curators and collection managers, stimulating changes

in policy and regulations. Community engagement is

felt at every level of museum life. New DOI and NPS

regulations might require community approval before

displaying or researching an arrowhead or potsherd. At

the ASC, we are fortunate that our Alaska Oce has

grown in step with changing museum responsibilities

for access and education, with strong support from the

Department, Museum, Repatriation, and Recovering

Voices. But the relentless squeeze on research and

collection management is a trend that will certainly

increase.

Despite custodial complications, the ASC has enjoyed

success in its research and education work. Our

Narwhal and Boreal Forest

(Understanding Nature:

Stories of the Boreal

Forest) exhibits continue

to travel in North America

with S.I.T.E.S., and Lights

Out: Recovering Our

Night Sky opened to great

acclaim in March with

major input from Stephen

Loring. We held a lively

bow and arrow workshop

organized with Brendan

Griebel and members of

the Kitikmeot Heritage

Society of Cambridge Bay,

Nunavut, with technical

support from bow and

arrow expert Coline

Lemaitre, who has been on a pre-doc fellowship with

the ASC. In October, Ted Timreck presented his epic

documentary, Ancient Sea Peoples of the North Atlantic

in our Q?rius Theater, and in late November, April

Counceller, Director of the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak,

Alaska, was the speaker for our annual Ernest S.

Burch Lecture.

On the research front, I completed my last eld season

of the 23-year Quebec St. Lawrence Gateways project,

excavating a small 16th century Basque whaling station

in St. Paul River. This coincided with the decision to

retire the R.V. Pitsiulak, our trusty partner on countless

northern expeditions in Labrador, Ban Island, and

Quebec. Her decommissioning coincided with the

passing of Stearns (Tony) Morse, who gifted the

Beaded artwork from the NMNH “Lights Out” exhibit:

Milky Way, Starry Night #2 by Margaret Nazon, Gwich’in

Tsiigehtchic, Northwest Territories, Canada. (NMNH-2023-

00127-S; read more in Stephen Loring’s Lights Out exhibit

report. Photo by P.R. Lee, B.M. Hance, and J. Di Loreto)

https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/anthropology/programs/arctic-studies-center Number 31

2 ASC Newsletter

vessel to the Smithsonian following the conclusion

of his Labrador geological research. This year I

published my Mongolian deer stone monograph, began

preparing a monograph on the archaeology of the

Mongolian Altai, and returned most of my remaining

archaeological collections to Newfoundland.

For Stephen Loring, the exhibit Lights Out:

Recovering the Night Sky brought a rewarding parade

of media interest that had the exhibit team much

in demand. Prior to a stint of eldwork with Innu

colleagues and associates in Labrador, he produced

reports on past research projects and collections from

the Aleutians, New England and Labrador, Tłı chǫ (Dog

Rib) ethnohistory, and new collection acquisitions.

Stephen was honored by an invitation to join the

External Advisory Council of the Center for Braiding

Indigenous Knowledge and Science (CBIKS), a

University of Massachusetts, Amherst group funded

by the NSF, to “braid together Indigenous and western

science to address the urgent and interconnected issues

of climate change, care of cultural places, and food

security”.

Dawn Biddison produced a booklet, DVDs, 15

videos, and a Smithsonian Learning Lab website for

the Batuk’enelyashi: Natural Dyes from Dena’ina

Lands project in collaboration with the Alaska Native

Heritage Center and June Simeono Pardue. In

January, with an Ahtna group she researched NMNH

and NMAI collections for Coming Home: Reclaiming

Ahtna Knowledge through Museum Collections. The

project inspired an Ahtna symposium and research

training documenting Ahtna Heritage. Dawn also

created Making Connections: Athabascan Lifeways and

You with Ahtna colleagues.

Aron Crowell completed a regional review of

southern Alaskan archaeology demonstrating repeated

(pulse) migrations by the Chugach (Sugpiat) between

Kachemak Bay, the Kenai Peninsula, and Prince

William Sound, correlated with warm and cool

phases of the Pacic Decadal Oscillation. His Yakutat

monograph, Laaxaayík, Near the Glacier: Indigenous

History and Ecology at Yakutat Fiord, Alaska, appeared

in April 2024. With ‘Life on a Sustainable Planet’

funding, Aron continued isotopic and archaeofaunal

research on a 7,400-year record of climate and

ecosystem change in the Gulf of Alaska, and as ASC

co-PI participated in science education projects in

Alaska and Washington, D.C.

Another important outreach project was my

collaboration with Igor Chechushkov that produced

an archaeological webinar series titled “Crossroads-2”

following in the footsteps of the ASC’s 1980s

pioneering Russian-American exhibition. Seven

lectures were conducted in 2023, translated into

Russian, and broadcast through public media channels

to Russian-language countries. The series continues in

2024 and may be extended into 2025.

Elisa Palomino continued her sh skin peregrinations

in European and Turkish museums. With John Cloud,

she researched ancient sh demi-gods in what is now

Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, in connection with the circa

9,000 BC ceremonial site of Gobekli Tepe, exploring

assertions made by Graeber and Wengrow in The

Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

(2021). Closer to home, Cloud published “Le Rendez-

Vous de Virginie” describing the nal naval battles

of the American Revolutionary War, which led to the

surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Freed from his service as Anthro Department Chair and

production of the Handbook of North American Indians

introductory volume, Igor Krupnik began museum

projects, focused on historical Arctic ethnographic

collections. He has been busy building new

international teams, working with Polish colleagues on

Stanislaw Poniatowski's collection at NMNH, and in

Wroclaw, Poland, with French colleagues on Nikolai

Gondatti’s Chukchi collection in Paris, and lately with

Norwegian colleagues in Oslo on their collections from

the Arctic coast of Northeast Siberia.

I hope you enjoy this issue, which has grown like topsy

this year due to expanding programs and scholarly

networks.

Khoton Lake in the Mongolian Altai featured in a 2024 ASC publication

ASC Newsletter 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

NOTES FROM THE DIRECTOR ......................... 1

2023/2024 PARTNERS AND DONORS ......................4

ANNUAL BURCH LECTURE

Burch Endowment Support for ASC Activities ............ 5

Allangaluta, Allangagkunata. We Are Dierent, We Are

Not Dierent: Community Research in The Kodiak

Alutiiq/Sugpiaq Region ................................................6

ALASKA OFFICE

NMNH Science Team Visits Alaska, June 2023 ........... 9

Climate Change and Coastal Adaptations in the Gulf of

Alaska .........................................................................12

Making Connections ................................................... 15

Ahtna Collections Access and Community Outreach ... 16

Woven Together: A “Together We Thrive” Project ..... 17

New Media .................................................................. 18

NEWS

Notes on an Archaeological Site Gone Missing .........19

Aleutian Islands Repatriation Up-Dates .....................20

3D Replication of the Mother Bear Hat for the

Teikweidi Clan of Angoon, Alaska ............................. 22

Tlingit Glacier and Lakes ............................................24

Reclaiming “Mutton,” the Coast Salish Woolly Dog ..25

The John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies,

Peary-Macmillan Museum .......................................... 26

Cambridge Bay’s Kuugalak Cultural Campus ............27

Reections on a Conference and Visit to the New

Bedford Whaling Museum ..........................................29

Emmanuel Korneliussen and the 2023 Delmarva

Paddler Retreat ............................................................ 31

My Heritage, My Aataanngua, and the World ............ 32

Narwhal Research of the Global Stage ....................... 34

The Threshold at which Snow Starts Disappearing ... 35

American Center for Mongolian Studies Celebrates Its

20th Anniversary .........................................................35

Mongolian Studies Conferences 2023, 2024 .............. 37

Immersivity and the First-Step-For-Mankind

Innovation of Small Watercraft ................................... 37

RESEARCH

Excavating a 16th Century Basque Whaling Station In

St. Paul River on Quebec’s Lower North Shore ........40

Update on Climate, Pack Ice Extent, and Harp Seal

Fluctuation in the Northwest Atlantic .........................43

Calibrating 55 Years of Radiocarbon Dates from

Labrador ..................................................................... 45

pXRF Identicatioin of Lithic Source Materials From

Stock Cove .................................................................. 47

“Viking Raincoats” and the Use of Vararfeldir (Pile

Weaving) in the North Atlantic ................................... 48

Göbekli Tepe: Ancient Natural History and Shamanic

Narrative of a Deluge? ................................................ 49

Ritual Birch Bark Traditions in Prehistoric Eurasia: A

Case Study From The Mongolian Gobi ...................... 50

Nobuhiro Kishigami and the NPPS ............................53

Research On Women’s Explorations in Greenland ..... 54

COLLECTIONS

“Waiting to Be Reunited”? ......................................... 56

Three-Dimensional Technology and Community-Based

Capacity Building in Sápmi ........................................ 59

Beyond Comer: Arctic Collections at Mystic Seaport

Museum.......................................................................62

Managing Museum and Coastal Site Collections ....... 64

Remote Engagement Technology for Improved

Collections Access ......................................................65

Mysterious Five-Sided Stone ...................................... 66

ASC-Kitikmeot Bow and Arrow Workshop ............... 66

Fish Skin Magic: Exploring Occult Practice in Ancient

Mesopotamia and Arctic Cultures ...............................68

OUTREACH

Lights Out ...................................................................70

Ancient Sea Peoples of The North Atlantic ................ 72

ASC Traveling Exhibitions .........................................72

The Crossroads 2 Webinar Series ............................... 73

INTERNS AND POST-DOCS

Summer Internships at the ASC ..................................74

Internship with Dr. Loring ..........................................74

Internship with Dr. Krupnik ........................................75

Vera Solovyeva—Sakha Post-Doctoral Fellow .......... 75

BOOK REVIEWS

Visceral: Verity, Legacy, Identity. Alaska Native Gut

Knowledge and Perseverance ..................................... 76

Material and Spiritual Culture of the Peoples of Yakutia

in World Museums ...................................................... 77

Deer Stones, Tattoos, and Warrior Women:

Transforming Archaeological Fact Into Fiction .......... 78

The Iñupiat of Northwest Alaska over the Past

Millennium ..................................................................79

Bows and Arrows of the Greenland Thule Culture

(1200–1900) ................................................................ 80

Tengautuli Atkuk: The Flying Parka: The Meaning and

Making of Parkas in Southwest Alaska. .....................81

The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited: Integrating

Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics ......................82

Indigenous Arctic Fish Skin Heritage, a Ph.D. thesis by

Elisa Palomino ............................................................ 82

Arrows: The Flight of the Handbook of North

American Indians ........................................................ 83

Laaxaayik, Near The Glacier: Indigenous History A

and Ecology At Yakutat Fiord, Alaska ........................ 84

TRANSITIONS

G. Carleton Ray (1928–2023) ..................................... 85

Sergei A. Arutyunov (1932–2023) ..............................85

Stearns Anthony (‘Tony’) Morse (1931–2024) ...........87

Tributes to Norman Hallendy (1932–2023) ................ 88

Don E. Dumond (1929–2023) .....................................90

Adieu, Pitsiulak ...........................................................91

2023 ASC STAFF PUBLICATIONS .....................93

4 ASC Newsletter

Alaska Native Heritage Center

Anchorage Museum Foundation

Anonymous

Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries & Museums

Laura Beauchamp

Ernest S. “Tiger” Burch Endowment

Carlson Family Trust

The Honorable Morgan Christen and Jim Torgerson

The CIRI Foundation

Perry and Ardene Eaton

William W. and Lynne D. Fitzhugh

Stephen W. Haycox

Heather Flynn

Innu Nation

Stephen Langdon

John Levy

Jo Michalski and the Honorable Peter Michalski

Mongolian Cultural Center of Washington D.C.

National Endowment for the Arts

National Museum of the American Indian

National Resources Defense Council

National Science Foundation

Government of Newfoundland and Labrador

Newfoundland Provincial Archaeology Oce

The Frances and David Rose Foundation

Gail and Jan K. Sieberts

Fred and Laurel Stutzer

Smithsonian Institution Legacy Challenge Fund

Smithsonian Institution Oce of the Provost

Smithsonian Institution Undersecretary for Science

(Life on a Sustainable Planet)

Smithsonian Institution Oce of the Undersecretary

for Education (Together We Thrive)

Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibit Service

Smithsonian Institution Recovering Voices Program

University of Montreal / Brad Loewen

Whiteley Museum, St. Paul River, Quebec

Frances Ulmer

James Vanstone Endowment

Kathie and Douglas W. Veltre

First National Bank of Alaska

Don Holly and Marcel Ashini

RESEARCH ASSOCIATES AND

COLLABORATORS

Noel Broadbent, Archaeologist, Washington, D.C.:

nbroadb@pipeline.com

John Cloud, Geographer, Washington, D.C.:

cloudj@si.edu, john.cloud666@gmail.com

Bernadette Driscoll Engelstad, Ethnologist:

bdengelstad@gmail.com

Scott Heyes, Geographer: scott@scottheyes.com

William Honeychurch, Archaeologist, New Haven,

CT: william.honeychurch@yale.edu

Anthony Jenkinson, Archaeologist, Northwest River,

Labrador, Canada: shaputuan@hotmail.com

Martin Nweeia, Dentist/Narwhal Researcher,

Cambridge, MA: martin.nweeia@hsdm.harvard.edu

Elisa Palomino-Perez, Fashion Designer, London,

UK: elisapalomino@hotmail.com

Kenneth Pratt, Anthropologist, Anchorage, AK:

kenneth.pratt@bia.gov

Wilfred Richard, Geographer/Photographer,

Georgetown, ME: 34PondRoad@gmail.com

Michèle Hayeur Smith, Ethnologist/Textile Spec.,

Providence, RI: raggirl9393@gmail.com

Kevin Smith, Archaeologist, Providence. RI:

surtshellir2018@gmail.com

Ted Timreck, Film Producer, New York, NY:

ttimreck@gmail.com

Christopher B. Wol, Archaeologist, Albany, NY:

cwol@albany.edu

The Arctic Studies Center is sustained through a

public-private partnership. Philanthropic donations

provide funding for essential community-based

collaborations, impactful educational programming for

the public, and continuous research in an ever-changing

Arctic region.

To make a tax-deductible donation, please contact

the NMNH Oce of Development at 202-633-0821

or NMNH-Advancement@si.edu.

THANKS TO OUR

2023/2024 PARTNERS AND DONORS

We extend our sincerest gratitude to the donors and partners who support the Smithsonian Arctic

Studies Center

ASC Newsletter 5

April Counceller, Director, Alutiiq

Museum, Kodiak

began working at

the Alutiiq Museum

as a college intern

and then returned

to the museum to

lead its educational

and language

departments, and to

work to preserve,

document, and

teach the Alutiiq

language, after

earning her BA in

Anthropology at

Brown University

(2002) and M.A. in

Rural Development

at the University

of Alaska Fairbanks (2005). In 2010, she received her

Ph.D. degree in Language Planning and Indigenous

Knowledge Systems at the University of Alaska

Fairbanks. April is one of the rst people in her

generation to gain uency in the Alutiiq language that

also helped her develop the Alutiiq Studies Program

at the local Kodiak College. She served as executive

director of the Alutiiq Museum since 2015 and was a

member of the Alaska Native Language Preservation

and Advisory Council in 2012–2022 that provides

recommendations and advice to the Governor of Alaska

and the State Legislature on programs, policies, and

projects related to Indigenous languages. We were

particularly interested in sharing April’s experience

in leading museum-based programs in support of

Indigenous heritage, language, and culture with wider

audience, including in our own museum.

Besides the Burch Lecture, the Endowment continued

to provide funds for many ASC public-focused

activities, such as the production, printing, and

shipping of the annual ASC Newsletter—of which

we produced two issues in 2023: a regular No.30 for

2022 and a special issue dedicated to the career of Bill

Fitzhugh, both of 90 pages. It supported contracts for

graphic and collection work for the ASC sta, the ASC

membership in the Arctic Consortium of the United

States (ARCUS), research work on other ASC-based

projects, and our sta needs throughout 2023. We plan

to continue using Burch Endowment to advance our

research and public programs, for conference travel

and eldwork, and for promoting Tiger Burch’s legacy

to the international Arctic research community via

publications, public programs and presentations, annual

Newsletter, conferences, and professional exchanges.

ANNUAL BURCH LECTURE

BURCH ENDOWMENT SUPPORT FOR ASC

ACTIVITIES IN 2023

By Igor Krupnik

The Ernest S. (‘Tiger’) Burch Endowment was

established with the NMNH Arctic Studies Center

(ASC) in 2012 via the generous gift of the family of

our late colleague and long-term research associate,

Ernest S (‘Tiger’) Burch, Jr, with the aim to support,

promote, and interpret the study of Arctic Indigenous

peoples and their cultures. The fund ensures that

our work and the legacy of Tiger’s many decades of

collaboration with the Smithsonian and ASC continues.

Over the past decade, the Burch Endowment remained

the prime source of funding for the ASC operations,

in addition to individual research grants, particularly

for our collective activities. In 2023, the Endowment

continued to provide its critical lifeline to the ASC.

With the softening and then lifting of travel and

eldwork restrictions, the ASC sta was able to resume

most of its eldwork and traveling activities. The Burch

Endowment supported Stephen Loring’s eldwork in

Labrador and Bill Fitzhugh’s work in Newfoundland

and Quebec North Shore in the fall and summer of

2023 respectively. It was a key source of travel funds

for many of our conference travels, including those

covered in this Newsletter, like Krupnik and Loring’s

trip to a conference at the New Bedford Whaling

Museum and Dawn Biddison’s participation in the

annual meeting of the Association of Tribal Archives,

Libraries, and Museums (ATALM) in Oklahoma City

OK, in October 2023.

As in the previous years, the Endowment supported

our main public event, “Tiger Burch annual lecture”

that helps promote our activities at the broader NMNH,

Smithsonian, and outside professional arenas. The

annual ‘Burch Lectures’ began in 2015 to feature

recent achievements in Arctic anthropological research

to wider audiences and to our colleagues worldwide.

We now have an impressive and diverse pool of

the former speakers (‘Burch alumni’) that includes

academic and Indigenous scholars from US/Alaska,

Canada, and Greenland. Collectively, their lectures

covered advances in archaeology, ethnology, Arctic

resource management, biology, history, collection and

Indigenous heritage, women’s studies, and more.

Our 2023 Burch Speaker was Dr. April Laktonen

Counceller, Executive Director of the Alutiiq Museum

in Kodiak, Alaska. Dr. Counceller is an Alutiiq tribal

member, who grew up in the community of Larson

Bay and in the town of Kodiak, on Kodiak Island. She

6 ASC Newsletter

ALLANGALUTA, ALLANGAGKUNATA. WE

ARE DIFFERENT, WE ARE NOT DIFFERENT:

COMMUNITY RESEARCH IN THE KODIAK

ALUTIIQ/SUGPIAQ REGION

By April G.L. Counceller

The Alutiiq Museum is

a Native-run nonprot

cultural center and

repository in Kodiak,

Alaska, and a leader

in community-driven

research. Throughout

the 20th century, Alutiiq/

Sugpiaq tribal leaders from

the Kodiak Archipelago

raised concerns over

researchers taking tribal

material heritage to

far-away museums and

universities, while the

Native community suered

from cultural disconnection

and fading traditions. By

the mid-1980s, the Kodiak

Area Native Association

(KANA) initiated culture

and language programs

and formed a culture

committee to develop

funding and plans for a

tribal museum. Village

bingo games became a

source of seed funding for

the committee’s planning

eorts.

The tragic environmental

disaster of the 1989 Exxon

Valdez Oil Spill resulted

in legal settlements

that included a fund for

restoration. Governed by state and federal trustees, the

fund was to support the study and stewardship of oiled

resources. Due to the damage to coastal archaeological

resources from the spill, as well as site looting during

cleanup eorts, KANA successfully argued for funding

to build a repository to house archaeological collections

from the region. The resulting Alutiiq Museum &

Archaeological Repository opened in 1995 with an all-

Alutiiq Board of Directors and a sta of three.

Today, the Alutiiq Museum cares for over 250,000

objects and has a sta of twelve. This includes the heart

of its holdings—large archaeological collections. It

also cares for ethnographic, photographic, audiovisual,

linguistic, archival, and natural history collections. One

of the collections that has grown the fastest in recent

years are the photographic collections. The museum

completed a community photo archive project during

the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in digitization

of over 45,000 photographs from communities

across the archipelago.

The majority of Alutiiq

Museum collections are on

long-term loan from their

owners, including Native

corporations within our

region. Our goal is to act

as a community repository

for the Alutiiq community,

so that cultural objects can

be preserved and shared,

but not separated from

their Native owners. We

have also worked to bring

collections back to Kodiak

by negotiating curation

agreements with the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service,

State of Alaska, U.S. Coast

Guard, and others.

The collections are

accessed by researchers,

Native community

members, and members

of the public. Artists will

sometimes look at and

sketch ancestral items

to serve as inspiration

for modern creations.

Educators and families like

to view the collections as a

read more like a novel.

Dr. David E. Wheeler’s

manuscript includes stories

about various sled dogs,

near-death experiences,

and successful hunting expeditions. During his two-

year quest for musk-ox, Wheeler kept a detailed journal

of his experience living among the Tłıchǫ. To help Dr.

Loring prepare the manuscript for publication, I began

compiling an index of all the locations, people, and

topics mentioned. For each entry, I added additional

background information to be used for adding footnotes

to the nal publication. Along with the manuscript, I was

given access to a collection of Wheeler’s photographs

and correspondences. After my inventory, I began

determining where in the manuscript each photo would

make the most sense. My favorite part was exploring

maps of Wheeler’s trip. Creating a supplemental map of

his journey was much more dicult than I anticipated.

Very few of the placenames written by Wheeler are listed

on modern maps. Wheeler wrote most of the locations by

approximating a phonetic spelling of the Tłıchǫ terms.

His guess work in combination with the non-standardized

spelling of the early 1900s, less-than-accurate depictions

in hand-drawn maps, and changes in location names since

the time of writing required a lot of detective work. If

anyone is looking for a travel agent to the very specic

region of the Northwest Territories surrounding Great

Slave Lake, I know more about the geography than I

imagined possible.

My summer in the Arctic Studies Center did not end with

the completion of my rst project. I began a series of

archaeological tasks, learning various skills of cataloging

and identifying artifacts. I worked with artifacts from

the Aleutian Islands and Labrador. Dr. Loring taught

me how to categorize various stone and bone tools,

ceramic sherds, wooden fragments, and faunal remains.

The miniscule bone needles and carved bone shhooks

were among my favorite artifacts because of their

impressively small detailing and preservation. Some

bonus education occurred when Dr. Torben Rick taught

me to identify marine animal teeth, pointing out various

clues such as the tricuspid shape of seal molars.

Outside of my ongoing

projects, there were a

handful of other stand-out

experiences. Multiple visits

to the Museum Support

Center with Dr. Loring

and Dr. Igor Krupnik gave

me the chance to examine

beautiful and intricate

cultural heritage objects.

Although we kept our visits

to manageable hours, I could

easily lose days enjoying

the immense collections at

MSC! We looked at objects

from the Tłıchǫ in conjunction with my manuscript

project, such as hunting bags, decorated clothing, and

snowshoes. In addition to full sized snowshoes, we

saw a pair of tiny shoes made for a toddler! With time

to spare before the next bus, Dr. Loring showed me

a few other items from the collection. We looked at a

number of Alaskan parkas made from various animals

such as caribou and ground squirrels. My favorite item

is a raincoat made from seal intestines that are stitched

together so tightly the coat becomes waterproof!

It is bittersweet to write this on my last day at the

Natural History Museum. Looking back over the

summer I am proud of all that I’ve learned and

accomplished and will miss the chance to come into

such a wonderful oce every day. I am eternally

grateful to the ASC team, especially to Dr. Loring for

taking me on and nding me assignments to work

on! As I head into my senior year as an anthropology

major at Washington and Lee University, this summer

has been invaluable in preparation for my anticipated

career in museum anthropology.

Lola Page (right), Adele Roulston, and Igor Krupnik at the

Museum Support Center examine the Winchester rie once

owned by Sitting Bull. Photo by Stephen Loring.

ASC Newsletter 75

INTERNSHIP WITH DR. KRUPNIK

By Lola Page

My connection to the Arctic Studies Center began

in June 2023 by almost complete chance. I had just

nished my rst year at the New School in NYC

coupled with an internship at the ‘Arms and Armor’

Department at the Met, and I knew, with condence,

I wanted to be involved in museum work. I was eager

to try nearly anything, and I gured my best chance

was with the familiar interests I had never gotten to

engage in a legitimate way. Upon an email hoping for a

chance to do just that, I began my internship under Igor

Krupnik at the ASC in mid-summer.

The project I undertook was organizing the Handbook

of North American Indians, Volume 1 archive. Such an

archive contained multitudes of correspondence, drafts,

and original materials for creating the 950-page book.

Prior to my arrival, the task to organize the contents

of this enormous le cabinet and several excess bins

had been partially completed pre-pandemic. I had little

to no knowledge of anthropology, and more notably,

none in archiving a project as extensive as this, but I

was eager to learn. The purpose of the Handbook was

to create a guide to dierent Indigenous cultures of

North America, and to document these cultures. It was

a perfect project, as it helped me achieve two things at

once: learn about Indigenous people through the actual

contents of the book and archive, but also learn how to

organize such a large project.

As Igor was the editor, much of these dual learning

opportunities grew not only from hands-on experience,

but also through long talks with him. Discussing

the many questions that I had for the nal published

product helped paint a fuller picture, not only about

the actual practice of anthropology, but also about

something as simple as what were the right questions

to ask. As our joint project went on, I became more

condent in navigating this new knowledge and sharing

it with others.

The Handbook project spanned decades, while my

internship with Igor was only a few weeks. There was

a balance between the actual contents of each chapter

draft, but also the stories of the many individuals who

contributed to the Handbook from the 1970s onward.

As I made it to the last few boxes, it became apparent

that Igor and I also played a role in this story. It seems

obvious in hindsight, but there is a way of being

overwhelmed by the magnitude of such a venture and

surrounding yourself with so much information at

once. I spent hours of my internship talking with Igor

about museum collections and anthropology. It was

an incredible experience to be a part of such a project

involving so many people over the course of a decade.

My own copy of Handbook Volume 1, and also Volume

4, bought at a secondhand store, now sit proudly on my

own bookshelf as a testament to what I learned.

VERA SOLOVYEVA—SAKHA POST-

DOCTORAL FELLOW

By Igor Krupnik

The ASC is pleased

to welcome Vera

Solovyeva (Ph.D. 2021,

Environmental Science

and Policy, George

Mason University), as

a postdoctoral fellow

for 2024–2025. Last

year, Vera received a

prestigious two-year

SI ‘Resilience and

Sustainability’ award

and is working with us

on her project, “Tracing

Climate Change through

Community Knowledge:

Sustainable Indigenous

Ethnobotany in Alaska and Siberia.” Vera was born

in the city of Yakutsk in Siberia, now the capital of

the Sakha Republic/Yakutia, Russia; she will be the

rst Siberian Indigenous (Sakha) scholar formally

aliated with the ASC. She grew up in the rural

area of Yakutia and is intimately familiar with the

ways Arctic Indigenous people use the resources of

their land and waters and track the impact of climate

change via numerous local indicators. Vera graduated

from the Yakut Federal University in Yakutsk with a

joint MS degree in Biology, Botany, and Chemistry

and worked in the 1990s as a researcher at the

Institute of Biology in Yakutsk. She also holds a

Ph.D. in Biology from the Russian Institute of Animal

Genetics and Breeding in St. Petersburg. During

her years of research in the North, she travelled

extensively across the Russian Arctic, also visited

Nome, Alaska, and has strong connections with the

American Museum of Natural History in New York

that houses Sakha ethnographic collections from the

Jesup North Pacic Expedition of 1897–1902. We

published a summary of Vera’s dissertational research

in an earlier issue of the ASC NSL (2021, 29:43–44).

Igor Krupnik will serve as Vera’s prime Smithsonian

advisor, with Dr. Kevin Jernigan, an ethnobotanist

from the University of Alaska Fairbanks as co-

advisor, and Darlene Orr from Sitka, Alaska, former

ASC Indigenous collaborator on the Crossroads

Alaska exhibit project.

76 ASC Newsletter

BOOK REVIEWS

VISCERAL: VERITY, LEGACY, IDENTITY.

ALASKA NATIVE GUT KNOWLEDGE AND

PERSEVERANCE, by Sonya Kelliher-Combs and

Ellen Carrlee: Alaska State Museum: Juneau 2023

Review by Igor Krupnik

This slim book of 92 pages, with its intriguing title

(“Visceral”) and a captivating red-orange-brownish

cover, is a catalog of the exhibit that was put on display

at the Alaska State Museum (ASM) in Juneau, AK

from May 5, to October 9, 2023.

The exhibit combined mixed-media

installations with an impressive

selection of objects from the ASM

collections, to which the catalog

adds extensive text, object and

display photographs, maps, and the

list of exhibited specimens (about

120 altogether). As seen from the

exhibit title, Visceral, the show tells

the story of objects made of animal

guts, or gut skin cover (membrane);

but its full message goes far beyond

the narrative of using animal organs

and intestines in Alaskan Indigenous

cultures. It is also about knowledge,

perseverance of tradition, skills, and identity, and about

keeping memory alive.

The catalog and the exhibit were co-authored by two

partners—Sonya Kelligher-Combs, a Native Alaskan

artist born in Bethel, who now lives in Anchorage, and

Ellen Carrlee, ASM conservator born in Sheboygan,

WI, now residing in Juneau. Sonya Kelligher-Combs

is a renowned artist of mixed descent: Iñuapiq from

Utqiagviq and Athabascan from the interior community

of Nulato in the Yukon River valley. She has been a

close partner to our ASC sta in the Anchorage Oce

and was named in several earlier Newsletters as a

consultant, event participant, project partner, and just a

close friend. The two collaborating experts—a Native

artist and a museum conservator—produced a show

and a catalog lled with power, knowledge, and great

artistic taste.

The masterpiece of the catalog is its section titled

Identity: Innovation (pp.48–65) that describes, in great

detail, major types of gut-skin raincoats and parka

covers used by dierent communities across Alaska—

from the well-known walrus or bearded seal gutskin

pieces made by the Iñupiat on the North Slope, around

Bering Strait, the Yupik on St. Lawrence Island, the

Yup’ik in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region, and by the

Cup’ig on Nunivak Island, to regional varieties of the

Unangax (primarily of Steller lion or northern fur seal),

Alutiiq (primarily of bear), and the Athabascan (often

of bear, also of beluga whale). Each type of garment

is described with the details of its design and making,

a Native name in the respective language, commonly

used materials, and other features that allow one to

distinguish it from other varieties. To those who deal

with such objects in museum collections, heritage

programs, student classes, and craft shows it oers the

rst-ever guide to the richness of Indigenous gut-skin

clothing.

Another invaluable section, Identity:

Knowledge, covers the preparation

of animal inner organs serving

as material for clothing, family

belongings, art pieces, and, simply,

food. It requires a lot of ingenuity,

skills, and special equipment to

transform thin skin of freshly

harvested game into a durable,

waterproof, and worn-resilient

material that is a characteristic

feature of many Native Alaskan

cultural traditions. It also takes a lot

of time and experience to transform

the gut and organ membranes of

walrus, seals, bear, caribou, whale, and other species

into objects as diverse, as raincoats, drums, boot pieces,

bags, and decorative materials. Though the elements

of the transformation—cleaning, removing the outer

and inner layers, soaking, inating, drying, whitening

(when needed), cutting, rolling, and storing are

generally known—this book oers the rst illustrated

guidance on all steps in this process.

The exhibit and catalog also carry a particular

message—the memory of abuse that many Native

Alaskans were subjected to in boarding schools,

missions, and in their home communities by (primarily)

Catholic clergy, lay employees, and Church volunteers

across the State of Alaska. On pages 5-6, readers may

nd the list of 35 Native Alaskan communities and of

dozens of people accused of (often repeated) sexual

abuse from the 1920s to the 1980s, but primarily in

the 1950s and 1960s, compiled by reporters from the

Anchorage Daily News. To that harrowing legacy,

Sonya Kelliher-Combs dedicated a special installation

titled “Credible” that combined maps featuring the

communities, quilts of acrylic polymer and seal

intestine, and dozens of small bags made of cotton

fabric, nylon thread, walrus stomach, reindeer and

sheep rawhide, acrylic polymer, and other materials

that were pinned to the wall on exhibit display.

ASC Newsletter 77

This powerful book is a must-read for Arctic curators

and museum conservators, but also for everyone

interested in the legacy and traditions of Alaskan

Indigenous people.

MATERIAL’NAIA I DUKHOVNAIA

KUL’TURA NARODOV YAKUTII V

MUZEIAKH MIRA/ MATERIAL AND

SPIRITUAL CULTURE OF THE PEOPLES

OF YAKUTIA IN WORLD MUSEUMS (17TH—

EARLY 20TH CENTURY). CATALOGUE. VOL.2,

BOOK 2, MUSEUMS OF GERMANY, BY A.N.

ZHIRKOV, ED., A.L. GABYSHEVA, YU. V.

KRAVTSOVA, G.G. NEUSTROEVA, AND V.V.

TIMOFE’EVA, Ayar: Yakutsk, 2023

Review by Igor Krupnik

In April 2023, a team of

museum specialists from

the Republic of Sakha/

Yakutia, a huge and

resource-rich region in the

Siberian Arctic, unveiled

a new catalog volume

in the ongoing series

dedicated to historical

ethnographic collections

from the territory of

Sakha/Yakutia in world

museums. This venture

began in 2006 by Sakha

museum professionals,

with funding from the

Russian section of the ICOM (International Council of

Museums/ICOM Russian Federation) and the Sakha

regional government, and with the endorsement by

the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The

original plan was to cover all ethnographic collections

from the Republic of Sakha/Yakutia preserved in

world museums in three regional clusters—“Museums

of North America,” “Museums of Europe,” and

“Museums of Russia.” Each would be featured in one

or several massive illustrated catalogs with a thorough

description of individual objects, in Russian and in

English. The project clearly followed the footsteps of

a similar venture from the 1990s, The Overseas Ainu

Collections, by a Japanese team directed by Yoshinobu

Kotani that covered over 13,500 Ainu ethnographic

objects stored in North American, European, and

Russian museums.

The latest volume of 784 pages, prepared by a team

led by Dr. Asia L. Gabysheva under the overall

project leadership of Dr. Alexander Zhirkov,

covers ethnographic collections in ve museums in

Germany—Museum at the Rothenbaum “Cultures and

Arts of the World” in Hamburg, Linden-Museum in

Stuttgart/State Museum of Ethnology, Rautenstrauch-

Joest Museum “Cultures of the World” in Cologne,

the Overseas Museum in Bremen, and the Museum

of Five Continents in Munich. Collectively, these

museums host over 2,000 objects belonging to several

Indigenous nations of Sakha/Yakutia—the Sakha/

Yakut, Dolgan, Evenk, Even, Yukaghir, and the

Chukchi—of which 1491 pieces are featured in the

catalog with color images. The 2023 volume listed

as “Book 2” is a sequel to “Book 1” published in

2018 that includes 1309 artefacts from four of the

largest ethnographic museums in Germany–Berlin

Ethnological Museum, the State Ethnographic

Collections of Saxony (SES)/Ethnographical Museum

Grassi in Leipzig and Dresden, Museum of World

Cultures in Frankfurt am Main, and the Ethnological

Museum of the University

of Göttingen in Göttingen.

These two books featuring

German museums follow

in the footsteps of Vol. 1

(2017, by Zinaida Ivanova-

Unarova) dedicated

to collections of two

American museums: the

AMNH in New York with

its monumental holding

of ca. 1550 objects from

the Jesup North Pacic

Expedition of 1897–1902,

and a much smaller stock

of 45 Sakha specimens at

the Smithsonian NMNH in Washington. Altogether,

the three volumes cover almost 4,400 Indigenous

ethnographic objects from Arctic Siberia.

All three published volumes, including the current

one, are organized along the same template. They are

framed as bilingual books (Russian and English) in two

columns, structured by the individual museums. Two

books of Volume 2 include detailed general overviews

of collecting Siberian/Sakha objects by German

museums and collectors; Vol.2 (2) also features short

biographies of the most important collectors and

donors (by A. Gabysheva). Each museum section

begins with an opening narrative on the history of its

respective Siberian/North Asian collections written

by a local curator. The main texts covering individual

museums are structured along the Indigenous groups

of the Sakha/Yakutia–the Sakha (Yakut), Dolgan,

Evenk, Even, Yukaghir, and the Chukchi. Within each

ethnic sub-chapter, objects are organized along major

cultural categories (clothing, jewelry, household items

including hunting and shing equipment, art objects,

78 ASC Newsletter

toys and games, shaman and cult objects, musical

instruments, and the likes). Individual object entries,

all bilingual, oer extensive description by Sakha

museum specialists and Indigenous knowledge holders,

plus Indigenous name/s for each object, and whatever

provenience data are available at the respective

museum. The format produces an unparalleled trove

of collection information for museum specialists,

Indigenous users, researchers, collectors, artists and

crafts people, and the general audience interested in

Siberian Indigenous cultures.

Unfortunately, these beautifully printed books with

accompanying CD-ROM(s) are now victims of their

technology. Due to the freeze in academic and cultural

cooperation with Russia following its war against

Ukraine, hardly any copies of vol. 2(2) reached Western

museums and libraries. Nor is there a way to access

the books online or upload a PDF at present. Evidently,

no steps were taken to post the objects on a unied

‘cloud portal,’ with the description, provenience data,

and color images prepared for the printed catalogs.

True, the objects remain under copyright of the

respective host institutions, but none of these museums

developed a user-friendly online search for its Siberian

collections either. It is hard to predict when the next

volume/s may be produced under the current political

situation, and a task to digitally “combine” the many

thousand ethnographic objects heroically retrieved and

researched by our Sakha colleagues in museums in

Europe and North America remains a distant prospect.

DEER STONES, TATTOOS, AND

WARRIOR WOMEN: TRANSFORMING

ARCHAEOLOGICAL FACT INTO FICTION

By Judith Lindbergh

As a novelist specializing in ancient historical ction,

archaeology is a primary source of inspiration.

Through my writing, I bring countless fragments of

material culture, midden debris, and human

remains back to life, shaping them into the

cultures and lives of my characters. My new

novel, Akmaral (Regal House, May 2024),

began with the storied Siberian Ice Maiden

discovered in 1993 by Natalia Polosmak.

Please don’t judge me because I came to

her in the most pedestrian of ways, via a

documentary on PBS! Often my stories are

sparked by a news article, documentary, or

exhibition that briey opens a window into the

past that begs me to nd out more.

The Siberian Ice Maiden led me to the late

Jeannine Davis-Kimball, Ph.D., whose book,

Warrior Women, shifted my focus from the Ice Maiden

to the Issyk “Golden Man” whom, she speculated,

might have been a woman. Davis-Kimball connected

the ancient Greek legends of Amazon warriors with the

women who fought and died of battle wounds and were

buried with their weaponry at their sides in kurgan

mounds across Central Asia. Suddenly, the breathtaking

expanse of the steppes became rich with possibilities,

and my titular character, Akmaral, became a young

warrior training to protect her people.

While I am no stranger to JSTOR or dig reports, to

create authentic ction I knew I had to dig deeper.

To research my rst novel, The Thrall’s Tale (Viking,

2006) about women in Viking Age Greenland, I sailed

from Iceland to Greenland on an ice-class ship. It

was the closest that I could come to experiencing my

characters’ journey. Once in Greenland, the haunted

landscapes, the icebergs groaning and clacking against

rocky shores, and the chill seat I took on the stony edge

of Erik the Red’s homestead, Brattahlid, lled me with

sensory experiences that helped me bring the lives of

the rst Norse settlers to the page.

Unfortunately, a decade later, I could not travel to the

Ukok Plateau in the heart of the Altai Mountains. Nor

could I visit The Hermitage to peruse its extensive

Scythian and Altai collections. My travels were

curtailed by the responsibility of raising two small

children, so I was forced to nd new ways to explore.

This time, I rode the Mongolian steppes and stood atop

the Altai peaks through the vivid reality of Google

Earth. I collected catalogues from every exhibition I

could nd, just to gaze at the full-color photographs

of objects made of gold, iron, wood, and bronze. I

thrilled at the 3D gallery tours of The Hermitage’s

collection of Scythian and Altai Bronze and Iron Age

materials. As I paused my mouse to ponder, a cluster

of iron arrowheads became a clutch retrieved from a

battle between nomad bands. A bronze mirror became

a ritual object that connected Akmaral to her shamanic

ancestors.

ASC Newsletter 79

But it isn’t enough to simply study and gaze. To

authentically reconstruct Akmaral’s everyday life, I

turned to the nomads of Mongolia and Kazakhstan. I

borrowed traditional wrestling and horse racing from

Naadam, the annual summer festival whose roots

go back to the Mongol Empire and likely beyond.

Central Asian folktales introduced me to the game of

kesh kumay that horseback herding people used for

courtship. I learned, at least in theory, how to build a

ger, dry cheese on its roof, ferment mare’s milk into

koumiss, and fashion bows and arrows. Then I put this

knowledge into practice. With my children, I crafted

rough bows out of freshly cut boughs, etching them

with goose feathers we found on hikes in the woods.

I pounded lint from our clothes dryer into fragile felt.

And I practiced archery in my backyard—until one

bad shot pierced a hole through my neighbor’s PVC

fence!—so that I could experience, in my own inexpert

way, the skills my woman warrior needed simply to

survive.

Beyond materials, traditions, or even survival practices,

I also had to understand what Akmaral believed. But

how do you conjure social values without documentary

evidence? The Scythians left no written record, and

the words of Herodotus and other ancient Greeks can

only be taken as hearsay, by some reports. To devise

an authentic origin story for Akmaral and her people,

I looked to both the west and east, drawing from

Herodotus’ story of the Amazons’ post-Trojan War

escape to justify her clan’s acceptance of her union

with a Scythian captive, while connecting Akmaral to

her Eastern and Siberian roots through the deer tattoo

that graces her shoulder, as it does the Siberian Ice

Maiden’s.

The deer stones of Mongolia became key to blending

the dierent aspects of Akmaral’s faith, merging east

and west in the powerful imagery of the ying deer.

Esther Jacobson’s invaluable The Deer Goddess

of Ancient Siberia became the source of some of

Akmaral’s most important beliefs and rituals, with

practices borrowed from reindeer herding nomads like

the Evenk, Ket, Nenets, and Dolgan.

Even when a novel is nished, I never stop researching.

Just as Akmaral was heading to typesetting, I came

across the Smithsonian Magazine article about Arctic

Studies Center Director William Fitzhugh’s new

research on deer stones. I immediately ordered a copy

of his Deer Stone Diary and he kindly followed up

with the full volume of Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan’s

extensive research. As I scanned new evidence that the

deer stones originated in the east and were carried west

to the Pontic steppes, a wave of panic struck me that

my ctional construction might be wrong. But then I

remembered DNA research that evidenced European

and mixed ancestry in several mummies found in the

Altai. This reinforced the connective leap I had taken

to create Akmaral’s combined Scytho-Siberian roots.

It also reminded me of something Jeannine Davis-

Kimball had mentioned in a 2007 email answering

some of my earliest research questions: that the tribes

of the ancient steppes had traveled freely both west and

east like the waves of a shallow sea.

I hope you will join me for Akmaral’s journey when my

novel is published in May 2024. Akmaral is available at

all major online book retailers.

Editor’s note: Judith Lindbergh’s debut novel, The

Thrall’s Tale, about women in the rst Viking Age

settlement in Greenland, was an IndieBound Pick,

a Borders Original Voices Selection and praised by

Pulitzer Prize winners Geraldine Brooks and Robert

Olen Butler. She is the Founder/Director of The

Writers Circle, a creative writing center based in New

Jersey.

THE IÑUPIAT OF NORTHWEST ALASKA

OVER THE PAST MILLENNIUM, BY

DOUGLAS ANDERSON. Borgo Publishing, 2023

Review by William Fitzhugh

Douglas Anderson

has published a major

monograph covering

a lifetime of research

on the Iñupiat cultures

of Northwest Alaska.

Doug once counselled

me to be cautious

accepting oers to

give symposium

papers because they

sap your time and

energy, keeping you

from making real

contributions—those

monographs that turn

elds around and last for centuries. Anderson has kept

his counsel and produced another monograph that

would have made his mentor James Louis Giddings,

Jr. proud many times over.

The Iñupiat of Northwest Alaska is a large format 264-

page book that combines detailed documentation of ve

periods of Iñupiat development beginning with Western

Alaska Thule and ending in 1930, when traditional

culture, subsistence, and settlement patterns had become

substantially transformed by Euroamerican contact. It

begins with a dedication to Froelich Rainey, Helge

Larsen, and Giddings, signaling Anderson’s schooling

80 ASC Newsletter

by three towering pioneers of ‘Eskimo’ archaeology that

laid the foundation for Anderson’s research. Despite

debunked early theories of Eskimo emergence from

the forests west of Hudson Bay, Giddings showed that

‘forest’ Eskimos had a long history in Kobuk River

Iñupiat woodland culture and were just as ‘Eskimo’ as

its their better-known coastal cousins. Two introductory

chapters describe the regional organization, adaptations,

and history of the Iñupiat people and how anthropology,

archaeology, oral history, and folklore combine to

produce a comprehensive—if still incomplete—

understanding of their 1000-year history.

The book’s voluminous data are organized in

a complex but ingenious way, presented in four

information categories: settlements, artifacts, statistical

studies, and fauna. Each of these categories are then

described for each of ve chronological periods, and

within these periods by three geographical regions:

coast, lower river, and upper river sites. Excellent

maps, site and house plans, artifact drawings, and

photographs accompany each category. Chapter 6

presents composite illustrations of artifact types by

chronological period, showing stylistic, technological,

and regional patterns. Many of the artifact plates are

in color, which is also used to enhance maps and

diagrams. Tables present tabulated data on artifact

types, raw materials, fauna, and other data by region,

period, and activity type, and house oor plans

illustrate the spatial patterns of artifact, material, and

faunal nds. A nal Chapter 7 summarizes “what

we think we have learned about the resilient and

resourceful Iñupiat culture”—which is A LOT!

Anderson’s opus is a monument to a career dedicated

to documenting the peoples and culture of a highly

complex region, from its river headwaters to the coast.

Not only has Anderson fullled the pledge of ‘complete

publication’ of one’s lifework rarely accomplished

by archaeologists; he has also trained a generation of

students in solid science that places indigenous peoples

and their well-being in the center of one’s professional

responsibilities. One of the many interesting features

of the monograph is the chatty language and informal

style of the subheads (“How the Iñupiat…Organized

Themselves Geographically”, “Ethnology and

Archaeology Tie the Knot in Northwest Alaska”

etc.), perhaps a contribution of the ne editing and

production work of Borgo Publications.

One of the themes central to Anderson’s work and

this monograph is attention to social mechanisms

within Iñupiat society and how its subsistence and

political systems interacted with the environment and

with Athabascan neighbors with whom they traded,

competed, or fought over for hunting, shing, and

extractive materials, and how relations were inuenced

by caribou crashes or abundance. These relations are

not easily perceived in the type of household settlement

archaeology that Anderson’s research featured. Given

the imbalance of material recovery for these groups,

archaeological evidence of shifting boundaries will

be dicult to obtain. Another major theme is simply

the sustained 1000-year history of Iñupiat culture and

population in a ‘cat-bird’ location between Eurasia

and America. One thing we can be sure of: Anderson,

assisted by decades of students, colleagues, and

indigenous partner, has opened a huge window into the

life, culture, and history of the Iñupiat people and given

us a structure for future investigations.

REVIEW: BOWS AND ARROWS OF THE

GREENLAND THULE CULTURE (1200–1900

AD). A STUDY OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND

ETHNOGRAPHIC SOURCES, BY SEBASTIAN

PFEIFER. BAR Publishing, 2021, 118 p.

Review by Coline Lemaitre

The hunting weapons of Arctic cultures have been

extensively documented

in more than 100 years

of ethnographic and

archaeological research,

and the weapons of

Greenland’s Thule

culture are no exception.

However, until now, no

study had synthesized

knowledge of Thule

bows and arrows from a

single geographic region,

combining ethnographic,

iconographic, and

archaeological materials.

Sebastian Pfeifer, from

Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, achieves this with

great clarity.

The book is structured in three sections in an approach

that creates an easy-to-read, beautifully illustrated

book. In the rst part, Pfeifer considers the mechanics

of the bow-and-arrow system based on traditional

archery studies of J. Hamm, by C. A. Bergman et

al., B.W. Kooi, and others. The main components of

a bow and arrow are summarized and illustrated with

diagrams and photographs, and the introduction to

Arctic bow and arrow terminology (i.e. “cable-backing,

“triple-curved prole”, etc.) gives the reader all the

keys to understand the rest of the book.

In the next section, the collections from the National

Museum of Denmark are analyzed in terms of technical

ASC Newsletter 81

and material components (design and cross-section of

bows and arrows, raw materials, assembly techniques,

mechanical properties), and cultural geography (Polar

Greenland, Northwest Greenland, Central West

Greenland, and East Greenland). The large dimension

of this analysis would give readers some head spins

were the text not supported by thematic maps showing

each object’s distribution across Greenland with

their technical and material characteristics identied.

The nal section is devoted to the bow and arrow

technology’s function and highlights its social and

environmental implications. This contrasts with the

purely technical analysis in the two previous parts and

shows the role this innovation played in the daily lives

of Greenland’s Thule people.

Pfeifer follows a “cataloguing” and diagnosing

principle in describing bow and arrow technology by

providing high-quality visual, metric, and technical

documentation. The study includes the most recent

archaeological data from North America. In addition

to analytical rigor, and scalar analysis (materials,

bow mechanics, assembly techniques, and uses), the

approach —studying both the bow and the arrow

as a system—provides a model for studying other

technological systems, for instance, harpoons.

The author’s “spatiotemporal and technological”

method highlights the heterogeneity and complexity

of the weapon. One might only regret the lack of

more discussion of analytical methods. The author

acknowledges that the study raises more questions

about a technology that is profoundly empirical in

its manufacture and use that only experimentation

could answer—something that so far has been missing

in Arctic archery. Overall, the author provides new

insight into Greenlandic bow and arrow technology

that should be of interest to a wide range of readers,

from the curious archer to the researcher specializing

in Arctic cultures.

TENGAUTULI ATKUK: THE FLYING PARKA:

THE MEANING AND MAKING OF PARKAS

IN SOUTHWEST ALASKA, BY ANN FIENUP-

RIORDAN, ALICE REARDEN, AND MARIE

MEADE. University of Washington Press, 2023.

Review by Bernadette Driscoll Engelstad

There is too much to praise in this deeply informative,

richly illustrated study of Yup’ik parka design by Ann

Fienup-Riordan, Alice Rearden and Marie Meade

to be covered in a short review. Flowing from the

knowledge and expertise of Yup’ik elders, Tengautuli

Atkuk: The Flying Parka provides unsurpassed insights

into the design and production of the Yup’ik parka—

particularly the woman’s parka—and its central role

within Yup’ik oral tradition, cultural history and lived

experience.

Published by the University of Washington Press,

this work draws on over twenty years of in-depth

discussions with Yup’ik elders. Acknowledging more

than 60 tradition-bearers, cited by the writers as the

true authors of the publication, each contributor is

identied by Yup’ik and English names, birth year, and

village of origin and residence. Although sadly, many

of these elders have passed, their memories, spanning

well over a century of personal experience, have been

documented in thousands of transcribed pages by the

authors over the years.

Emerging from a series of parka-focused workshops

held in Bethel and Anchorage supported by the Calista

Elders Council (CEC, now Calista Education and

Culture), the research project culminated in a study

of Yup’ik historical clothing at the Smithsonian’s

National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and

National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) by

elders Albertina Dull, Elsie Tommy and Martina

John as well as Mark John, Ann Fienup-Riordan,

Ruth Jimmie and media intern Abby Moses with

funding assistance from CEC and the National Science

Foundation.

A multi-generational achievement, the text interweaves

Yup’ik oral history with women’s expert knowledge

of material resources and exceptional skill as creative

designers and seamstresses. Over the course of several

chapters, the authors detail the production of fur, bird-

skin, seal-gut and sh-skin parkas with meaningful

insights into the repository of family designs that create

and strengthen social relationships over time and space.

Elders Martina, Albertina, and Elsi examining the fur strip

bordering the neck opening. E76708-0, Department of

Anthropology, Smithsonian institution. Photo by Ann Fienup-

Riordan

82 ASC Newsletter

A treasury of photographs taken in the 1930s by Dr.

Leuman M. Waugh (NMAI) as well as prints of color

slides from the 1960s in the collection of Mabel and

Harley McKeague at the University of Delaware, not to

mention contemporary images by Ann Fienup-Riordan

stretching over more than twenty years, complement

and enliven the text. Most notably, the publication

includes the bilingual transcription of several legends

(qulirat) dealing with the Yup’k parka as subject—

including Tengautuli atkuk / The Flying Parka related

by Paul John—as well as diagrams of parka styles

by Wassilie Moses and Deborah Reade with design

elements identied in Yup’ik and English, and maps

identifying locations mentioned in the text. The book

design by Katrina Noble stands out for its exquisite

attention to detail, graphic artistry, and impressive use

of stylistic elements.

Finally, the workshop methodology used in shaping the

parka project provides a critical model for recording

community knowledge across a geographical and

temporal expanse. The myriad contributions of elders,

seamstresses, linguists, photographers, illustrators,

and designers have not only enriched the collaborative

work of the authors but produced a foundational text

that will serve as a critical guide and vital source of

inspiration for future generations.

THE INDO-EUROPEAN PUZZLE REVISITED:

INTEGRATING ARCHAEOLOGY, GENETICS,

AND LINGUISTICS, EDITED BY KRISTIAN

KRISTIANSEN , GUUS KROONEN, AND ESKE

WILLERSLEV. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Reviewed by Igor Chechushkov

The Indo-European

Puzzle Revisited is a

comprehensive overview

of the current state of

early Indo-European

studies, covering topics in

archaeology, linguistics,

and genetics. The book

comprises a collection of

papers originally presented

at the conference titled

“When Archaeology

Meets Linguistics and

Genetics,” hosted by

Gothenburg University

in 2018, and is organized

in ve parts. Part I delves into Early Indo-Europeans

from both archaeological and linguistic perspectives,

oering up-to-date information on early steppe

pastoralists. Part II explores the dispersal of Indo-

Europeans, encompassing detailed studies of mining

and metallurgy-related terminology in the Indo-

European language, thus bridging archaeology with

linguistics. Part III focuses on the Bell Beaker horizon

of the Atlantic Fringe, addressing topics such as long-

distance exchange in the Bronze Age and ancient

human DNA. Part IV explores the chariot and wool

horizons of the Bronze Age, examining topics related

to the absolute chronology of the chariot complex and

wool terminology. Finally, Part V examines previously

understudied topics concerning kinship systems

and prehistoric slavery. The book not only advances

research in Indo-European studies but also contributes

to our understanding of the prehistory of the Eurasian

continent by opening new avenues of research. The

Society for American Archaeology (SAA) recognized

this contribution as the most important scholarly

research in archaeology for the year 2023.

INDIGENOUS ARCTIC FISH SKIN

HERITAGE, A Ph.D. THESIS BY ELISA

PALOMINO

By Elisa Palomino

My recently completed Ph.D. represents an

interdisciplinary exploration intersecting fashion,

sustainability, Arctic eldwork, anthropology, and

museum collections. The research builds on the

design practices I instigated during eight years as

head of John Galliano's design studio, developing

sh skin garments for his signature collection.

The highlight of my PhD journey was a Fulbright

Fellowship at the Arctic Studies Center (ASC) in

Washington DC, and in Alaska, where I collaborated

with Indigenous communities and developed global-

scale engagements, spanning three continents,

nine countries, and forty international museums.

The thesis includes literature review, ethnographic

research, artifact analysis, interviews with sh skin

professionals and museum curators, collaborative

workshops, and educational programmes with

students in Arctic and Subarctic environments. The

overarching theme is the examination of how sh

skin connects populations across the Arctic. This

practice aligns with principles of respecting the

relationship between all things on Earth, countering

contemporary practices of over-consumption. This

research has been instrumental in establishing positive

relationships linking historic Indigenous collections

with contemporary communities and addresses critical

issues in contemporary sustainable fashion practices,

presenting the transformation of seafood waste

into leather. Environmental considerations include

overproduction, sh rearing conditions, chemical

pollutants in tanning and dyeing, water and energy

ASC Newsletter 83

use, and responsible material disposal. Rooted in the

resourcefulness of Arctic cultures, the work advocates

for the rights of Indigenous Peoples, animals, and the

natural environment, oering a less consumerist form

of fashion. The interdisciplinary approach identies

sustainable alternatives to conventional sh leather

production processes to minimize environmental

impact.

I owe special thanks to Bill Fitzhugh and the ASC

team: Stephen Loring, John Cloud, Igor Krupnik,

Bernardette Driscoll Engelstad, Nancy Shorey,

Aron Crowell and Dawn Biddison. By hosting me

as a Fulbright scholar, Fitzhugh granted me access to

the world’s most extensive collection of Alaskan sh

skin artefacts and introduced me to his dedicated team

in Washington D.C. In Anchorage, Aron Crowell and

Dawn Biddison introduced me to museums across

Alaska and to Alaska Native sh skin artists. Fitzhugh’s

publications and exhibitions have been an inspiration.

Stephen Loring shared his knowledge of sh skin

collections, while his passion for contemporary

fashion helped me to link the study of Arctic

traditional materials with contemporary fashion. John

Cloud’s knowledge of Arctic cartography contributed

extensively from the areas of Arctic sh skin tradition.

The dissertation is available online.

ARROWS: THE FLIGHT OF THE HANDBOOK

OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS

Series review by John Cloud

Publication of Volume 1, Introduction, the opening

volume of the Handbook of North American Indians

(NMAI) series started in the 1970s, deserves a

comment after a half-century of Smithsonian enterprise.

It is without question, the most in-depth and longest-

running publication project ever undertaken by the

Institution. The Handbook originated from a suggestion

by curator John C. Ewers to update Bureau of

American Ethnology (BAE) Bulletin 30: Handbook of

American Indians North of Mexico. The plan proposed

by series editor, William C. Sturtevant, called for

quarto-sized volumes with copious maps, illustrations,

and photographs. Volumes would address cultural

regions, from northern Mexico to the Arctic, along with

various thematic “cross-cutting” volumes. The project

ended in 2007, with the last volume published in 2008,

and various other volumes were abandoned, including

the introductory volume. In 2013, Mary Jo Arnoldi,

then Chair of Anthropology, proposed to create Volume

1, and Igor Krupnik agreed to organize and edit the

swan-song volume, which appeared in 2022 in print

and digital format.

Since most ASC readers today have no knowledge of

the Handbook’s history, I oer a few notes comparing

the Handbook process to a ight of arrows, some

falling to earth prematurely while other reached their

mark. The completed volumes (“arrows”) included

v.8 California (1978), v.15 Northeast (1978), v.9 and

10 Southwest (1979, 1983), v.6 Subarctic (1981), v.5

Arctic (1984), v.11 Great Basin (1986), v.4 History of

Indian-White Relations (1988), v.7 Northwest Coast

(1990), v.17 Languages (1996), v.12 Plateau (1998),

v.13 Plains (in 2 vols., 2001), v.14 Southeast (2004),

v.3 Environment, Origins, and Populations (2007),

v.2 (Indians in Contemporary society (2008), v.1

Introduction (2022).

William C. Sturtevant, who served as the general

editor for most of the Handbook’s existence, planned

20 volumes which were to be published in order of

their completion rather than in number sequence.

The Introduction and several other volumes fell prey

when funding terminated. Two thematic volumes

were completed because of their social relevance: v.4,

History of Indian-White Relations, and v.17 Languages,

which was driven by the appearance of Ives Goddard

early in the project’s history, in part for his linguistics

skills, but also for his management skill.

Now to the ights of arrows. The rst headwind was

the complex relationships between the enterprise, the

Smithsonian “Castle” administration, and the U.S.

Congress. The Handbook began under S.I. Secretary

S. Dillon Ripley at a time of great expansion of

Smithsonian museums. As each succeeding Secretary

arrived, it grew more dicult to maintain Handbook

funding, as each successively was challenged to push

the Handbooks forward, with varying success. In 2007

funding dried up and the project was abandoned in

mid-stream—that arrow fell short.

Sturtevant’s trajectory was complex. He was superbly

educated, had connections to scholars worldwide,

84 ASC Newsletter

read French, Spanish, and German, and was devoted

to “four eld” anthropology. But he was not good

at delegating authority, and his attention to detail

while creating a series of superb volumes eventually

resulted in production delays and, ultimately, in several

unnished volumes (like the most recent Volume 1).

Another arrow was the growing critique of the

legitimacy of “anthropology” during the Handbook’s

long tenure. These included Indigenous critiques of the

anthropological discipline and its practices; the idea

that archaeology was seen by some Native Americans

as a kind of ‘looting’ of their past; and the arcane

museum practices toward Native American artifacts,

human remains, and allied issues that led to new

laws like the Native American Graves Protection and

Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). In eect, the Handbook

lasted for so long that the earth changed underneath the

arrow in ight.

A nal arrow was that the Handbook clung to an

outmoded publication model. Initially, submissions

came to the Handbook as typewritten manuscripts to

be edited and retyped many times by hand. By the

1970s, at the very least, large institutional presses

were compositing nal text and formatting graphics

with computers. Handbook materials could have been

worked with digital les, but this did not occur till the

very last volumes. Further, all graphics, maps, and

photographs were negotiated for one-time use rights.

This meant that volumes published between 1978 and

2008 could not be scanned or re-formatted as digital

les and publications unless new publication contracts

were negotiated with all rights holders, many of whom

were no longer living.

All Handbook arrows returned to earth, with one

exception—volume 1, Introduction. The book that was

to introduce the series became its nale. Like all the

other series volumes, it is massive, profusely illustrated

(in color), densely constructed, with a comprehensive

bibliography by Corey Heyward and Cesare Marino,

excellent indexing, Indigenous participation, and

thematic sets of chapters compiled and edited by

Igor Krupnik, volume editor, and the editorial team

including Ives Goddard, the late Ira Jacknis, Sergei

Kan, Ann McMullen, William Merrill, J. Daniel

Rodgers, Gabriel Tayac, and Joe Watkins. Dan

Cole did the extensive cartography, as he did for many

volumes of the original project. There is also a whole

paragraph of others who worked on the volume, whom

I am leaving out lest I miss someone. Igor’s editor’s

Preface and introductory essays provide a deep history

for the entire Handbook project of 1966–2022. Volume

1 is the only one in the series accessible online and

available for free download.

BOOK NOTICE: LAAXAAYIK, NEAR THE

GLACIER: INDIGENOUS HISTORY AND

ECOLOGY AT YAKUTAT FIORD, ALASKA,

BY ARON L. CROWELL. SMITHSONIAN

CONTRIBUTIONS TO KNOWLEDGE #55.

Smithsonian Institution Press.

Fiord glaciers of

southern Alaska reshape

landscapes as they

advance and retreat

in response to climate

cycles, inuencing

coastal ecosystems by

enriching marine food

webs with minerals

carried in meltwater

and ice oes. On

land, biodiverse forest

ecosystems grow and

mature as glaciers

withdraw, connected to

the sea by glacially fed

rivers and lakes where salmon spawn.

For millennia, Alaska Native peoples have lived and

thrived in these highly productive cryogenic biomes,

harvesting bounties of plant and animal foods by

employing complex ecological knowledge, adaptive

technologies, and lineage-based social patterns of

cooperation and resource sharing. A longitudinal study

of the 1,100-year cultural ecology of Yakutat ord in

Southeast Alaska was conducted during 2011–2014

by the Smithsonian Institution’s Arctic Studies Center

and the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe to document Little Ice

Age glacial retreat; settlement of the emerging ord

by migrating Eyak, Ahtna, and Tlingit clans; and

utilization of the ord’s marine and terrestrial habitats

by past and present residents.

Applying principles of knowledge coproduction, this

study joins oral ecological and historical knowledge

shared by members of the community with scientic

data from archaeology, archaeofaunal analysis, marine

and terrestrial ecology, glaciology, subsistence surveys,

and historical archives. Information and cultural

perspectives from interviews conducted in English

and Tlingit with community scholars, hunters, and

artists are presented alongside results of archaeological

investigations at former villages and camps dating from

the thirteenth century to the 1960s. Special emphasis

is placed on hunting and consumption of harbor

seals (Phoca vitulina), a cultural focus and principal

subsistence species throughout Yakutat history. The

study demonstrates the centuries-long construction and

modication of a cultural niche, or integrated human

role, within the ecosystem of Yakutat ord.

ASC Newsletter 85

TRANSITIONS

G. CARLETON RAY (1928–2023): NATURAL

HISTORIAN

By Igor Krupnik

The Arctic Studies Center lost

an old and trusted partner with

the passing of marine biologist

and conservationist G. Carleton

Ray, 95, on December 14,

2023. His last position was

a research professor at the

Department of Environmental

Sciences, University of Virginia,

in Charlottesville VA, where

he and his wife and coauthor,

Jerry McCormick-Ray had

been working for over 40 years,

before retiring in 2022. Carleton

was a man of many talents

and of highly diverse interests,

who operated at ease at many

scales in biology, ecosystem studies, and conservation.

In one of his bios, he identied his research as

reaching into several scientic disciplines, including

animal physiology, taxonomy, oceanography, physics

(acoustics), and behavior, and falling into the categories

of coastal and marine biodiversity, land- and seascape

ecology, marine mammal ecology, and physiological

ecology, each leading to coastal-marine conservation.

His geographic focus was equally diverse. Over his

long career, he worked in the Bering Sea, Chesapeake

Bay, the Bahamas, in Antarctica, small islands in the

southern Pacic and the Atlantic, and other places.

He was a deep-ocean diver, an avid photographer, an

accomplished guitar player, a good storyteller, and at

one time, a milk-father of baby walruses.

Carleton was a top-notch scholar, with his B.S., M.S.,

and Ph.D. degrees in Zoology from Yale, University of

California Berkeley, and Columbia, respectively. Before

his long tenure at UVa, he taught at Columbia, Rutgers,

and Johns Hopkins University. Besides his many diving

expeditions and ocean cruises, he worked for ten years as

curator at the New York Aquarium in Brooklyn, NY and

was twice a research associate at the Smithsonian, with

a small oce next to the Anthropology Chair’s space at

the Natural History Museum. He was instrumental in the

making and passing of the Marine Mammal Protection

Act of 1972. He was also a humble and widely respected

person, with great wit and sense of humor.

Carleton and I met in May 1999 in the Yupik town of

Gambell on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, where he and

his wife Jerry were organizing a skin-boat trip with a

Yupik crew to observe migrating walruses among the

ow of rapidly drifting ice. Over the years, I heard

numerous stories about his many visits to Gambell

in the late 1950s and 1960s for

underwater observations of walrus

feeding and mating behavior. He

was befriended by several hunters

and Yupik Elders, with whom he

made easy and natural connections.

Almost fty years later, in February

2004, I persuaded Carleton to

go with me on a trip to another

island community, Savoonga,

where, I introduced him to a Yupik

marine mammal expert, Chester

Tapghaghhmii Noongwook

(1933–2019—see ASC Newsletter

27). It was such a pleasure to watch

two wise men enjoying each other’s

knowledge and company. Carleton

was always keen on including an anthropologist’s and

Indigenous users’ perspective, so that I became his co-

author on several papers and book chapters about the

Bering Sea ecosystems and Pacic walrus.

Carleton was one of the very few contemporary

scholars who proudly called himself a ‘natural

historian’ or a ‘naturalist.’ He always professed an

integrative vision and stressed the myriad links among

environment, marine mammals, and people who live

by hunting them. He contributed a great chapter titled

“Arctic Crashes: A Naturalist’s General Perspective”

to our Arctic Crashes volume (Krupnik and Crowell

2020), in which he articulated his vision. Together with

his wife Jerry, he published an award-winning textbook,

Coastal-Marine Conservation: Science and Policy

(2004, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford) reprinted as Marine

Conservation: Science, Policy, and Management in

2014. The world of marine conservation and of marine

mammal science will be a dierent space without one

of its last dedicated ‘naturalists.’ He will be greatly

missed, and our deep sympathy goes to his wife of 46

years, Dr. Jerry McCormick-Ray.

SERGEI A. ARUTYUNOV (1932–2023):

‘CROSSROADS’ PARTNER

By Igor Krupnik and Bill Fitzhugh

Russian and international Arctic/North Pacic

anthropology lost one of its last ‘giants’ with the

passing of Sergei A. Arutyunov, 91, in Moscow,

Carleton and Jerry Ray, 2020. Photo by Tom

Cogill, courtesy of UVa Dept. Envir. Sci.

86 ASC Newsletter

Russia, on December 21, 2023. He was born in Tbilisi,

then the capital of the Soviet Republic of Georgia

(today’s independent Republic of Georgia), in a mixed

family with strong Armenian roots and broad cultural

background. He received

his B.A. in the Japanese

language at the Institute

of Oriental Studies in

Moscow and a Ph.D. in

Japanese anthropology

at the then-Moscow

Institute of Ethnography

(today’s Russian Institute

of Ethnology and

Anthropology—IEA). He

was elected a Corresponding

Member of the Russian

Academy of Sciences in

1990, served as the head of

the Department of Caucasus

at the IEA, and received

numerous awards in Russia,

Armenia, Japan, and other

nations.

His professional interests

and the geography of

his eld studies were

remarkably diverse. For

decades, he was known

as the leading Russian

specialist in traditional

Japanese family life and

everyday culture. Yet after

completing his Ph.D. thesis on medieval Japan in

1958, he joined his mentor, Maxim G. Levin, and

archaeologist Dorian Sergeev on a trip to the Russian

side of Bering Strait to excavate the newly discovered

ancient Eskimo burial ground near the Chukchi town

of Uelen. That rst trip triggered Sergei’s lifelong

connection to Arctic anthropology and ancient Eskimo

cultures, from Bering Strait to Greenland. For several

seasons from 1958 to 1975, he took part in excavating

the Uelen burial ground and later, another ancient

settlement at Ekven, at the southern entry to Bering

Strait. These excavations resulted in magnicent

museum collections of ancient Eskimo artefacts now

housed in St. Petersburg and Moscow, several exhibits,

two monographs co-authored with Sergeev, and several

dozen papers in Russian, English, French, German,

and other languages. In course of these excavations,

he became a renowned expert on the early Eskimo arts

and ornamentation styles and on Bering Sea cultural

typologies developed by Smithsonian Henry B. Collins

in the 1930s. In 1977, he joined Michael Chlenov

and Igor Krupnik on a survey of the site called

‘Whalebone Alley’ (the book by three co-authors was

published in 1982). He returned to Chukotka in 1987,

to inaugurate a new cycle of excavations at Ekven

led by his former student, Michael Bronstein. In

between, he spent several

eld seasons working as

ethnologist among the

Nenets reindeer herders in

Western Siberian Arctic

(with Vladimir Vasiliev),

Armenian peasants in

Armenia (with a large

Armenian eld team),

and among various ethnic

groups across India and

Vietnam.

Since the 1960s, Sergei

was a world known

‘star’ and international

darling of the then-Soviet

anthropology. Intellectual,

artistic, well-read, and

uent in many languages,

including English, French,

German, and Japanese,

he was a constant feature

at international meetings,

where he eagerly served as

a mediator and interpreter

to his colleagues. His

elaborated wine toasts

at many a dining table, a

cultural legacy of his native

Georgia, and his hilarious poetic inscriptions written

for his friends were cherished as treasures. He was an

internationally admired scholar, particularly in Japan, a

true ‘Crossroads’ man, who comfortably moved across

and between cultures, nations, and continents.

No wonder that in 1979 Sergei was chosen as the

Soviet/Russian co-lead for the international exhibit

project, “Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of

Siberia and Alaska.” It brought him in a decade-long

collaboration and, eventually, personal friendship

with his anthropology colleagues at the Smithsonian

National Museum of Natural History. His relationship

with the Smithsonian began a few years prior when he

participated as a speaker and panelist at a symposium

on circumpolar maritime adaptations organized by

William Fitzhugh at the 1974 9th International

Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences

in Chicago. This was the rst anthropological meeting

in the U.S. to be attended by several Russian scholars.

During that meeting Sergei ‘stole the show’ by seizing

the microphone from ocial translators who proved

Top: Arutyunov demonstrating a spear at the Museum of

Anthropology and Ethnography

Bottom: Crossroads team toasting prospective success with

MAE director Rudolph Its: Joanne MacDonald, Bill Holm,

William Sturtevant, Rudolph Its, Sergei Arutyunov, James

VanStone, and George MacDonald

ASC Newsletter 87

incapable of properly translating professional papers in

Russian and Japanese (something he reportedly did at

several meetings). When the Smithsonian launched the

planning for the “Crossroads of Continents” exhibit

in 1977, Sergei became the lead actor on the Soviet

side. He shepherded the American curators’ visits to

the rich Russian-America collections at the Museum

of Anthropology and Ethnography in St. Petersburg,

and Soviet curators’ trips to the American Museum

of Natural History in NYC and to the Smithsonian in

Washington D.C. He then led the Soviet delegations to

several Crossroads venues in DC, NYC, Anchorage,

and other locations in North America. In addition

to his contributions to the exhibit, its catalogue, and

symposium volume, Sergei and his younger colleague,

the late Sergei Serov, became the rst Soviet

anthropological ‘ambassadors’ to counter the American

propaganda of a Soviet Evil Empire. Following

Crossroads, Sergei’s inuence led to decades of

Smithsonian and other institutions’ collaborations

with Russian ethnologists and archaeologists, opening

new, long-lasting ‘crossroads’ doors with Alaskan,

Smithsonian, and other American and Canadian

colleagues. Those research and friendship ties helped

bring many more Russian scholars to the USA and

fostered growing research collaborations until the

recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Sergei Arutyunov’s passing marks a generation

of collaboration that for several decades realized

Knud Rasmusson’s 1933 dream of a coming

global partnership in the study of Eskimo origins.

Knud cautioned that this “cannot be brought to

realization in the twinkling of an eye,” but thought it

would eventually take place as a “great cooperative

undertaking”. Sergei’s legacy, besides his many other

accomplishments, brought Rasmussen’s dream to

reality. We hope that a world, after the ugly war is over,

will awake again to Knud’s and Sergei’s vision.

STEARNS ANTHONY (‘TONY’) MORSE (1931–

2024)

By Elise Morse-Gagne published in Daily Hampshire

Gazette on Feb. 10, 2024

Pelham, MA—Stearns Anthony “Tony” Morse died

on January 9, 2024, six days after his 93rd birthday.

Tony was born in 1931 to Stearns Morse and Helen

(Ward) Field Morse in Hanover, NH, the youngest of

four children. The family spent summers on a family

farm in Bath, NH. Tragedy struck in 1937 when Tony's

brother Stephen, 11, and a friend both drowned while

shing…Tony matriculated at Dartmouth College

in 1948. From 1949 to 1952 he spent summers

working on the schooner Blue Dolphin, operated as an

oceanographic research

vessel on the Labrador

coast by David C.

Nutt, a Dartmouth

professor. After

graduating with a major

in geology he was

drafted into the Army

and served for two

years in post-WWII

Germany, learning

to ski and to love

opera; immediately

upon his return to the

States, he returned to

Labrador for further

eldwork. Breaking

his leg in the eld, he

was transported by

helicopter to the Grenfell Mission in Northwest River,

where Dorothy Forbes was volunteering as a nurse's

aide after her rst year at Vassar College. The two were

married in 1960.

In 1962 Tony earned his Ph.D. in Geology from McGill

University and joined the faculty of Franklin and

Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, where the couple

raised their three daughters, Elise, Anne, and Sophie.

Tony continued to research Labrador anorthosites in

the summers. Dorothy joined him for several of these

excursions, living in a beaverboard cabin some 25

miles north of Nain with rst two young children, then

three, assisted by Benigna Semigak, from Nain.

In 1971 Tony took a position in the Earth Sciences

department at UMass Amherst. The family moved

to Massachusetts, and Tony launched a decade-

long research project studying the Nain Anorthosite

Complex with a series of graduate students, now using

a mobile base camp in the form of R/V Pitsiulak, which

he designed based on the Newfoundland Long Liner

work boat. Dorothy and their children lived aboard as

well for part of several summers, and Anne and Sophie

each returned in later years to work as assistants. In

1977-78 the Morses lived in Oslo, Norway, where Tony

collaborated with colleagues at Universitetet i Oslo. In

addition to his exploration of anorthosites, Tony studied

the nature of the Earth's core-mantle boundary and the

thermodynamics of rocks and melts. His 1980 textbook

Basalts and Phase Diagrams is a foundational resource

in the eld of petrology…and he published almost 90

research articles.

In 2013 Tony, then 82, with Anne Morse and her

daughter Emily, organized and led the Kiglapait Field

Conference, a unique gathering in Labrador for 22

geologists from around the world. In 2019 he received

Tony Morse on a Blue Dolphin

Labrador oceanographic cruise

in 1951

88 ASC Newsletter

the Mineralogical Association of Canada's highest

award, for outstanding contributions to the mineral

sciences of Canada. He was a Life Member of Clare

Hall at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the

American Geophysical Union, a Carnegie Fellow, a

Senior Fellow of the Mineralogical Association of

America, and a Fellow of the Geological Society of

America.

In an era of increasingly siloed specialists, Tony

was multifaceted. He was a lifelong outdoorsman:

a eld geologist, navigator, scything promoter and

contestant, avid skier, builder, (maple)sugar-maker,

hunter, and active manager of woodlands. He was also a

rigorous scholar who conducted meticulous laboratory

experiments, and a lucid and precise writer with a gift

for exposition and unexpected analogies. A colleague

recalls that “everyone wanted Tony to write their tenure

recommendations” because his writing, while always

impeccably correct, was never “geeky.” He loved

poetry, especially the works of Robert Frost, and could

quote long passages by heart. In his 20s, prevented by

bad weather from getting into the eld in Labrador, he

translated a Moravian missionary's account of the deadly

1918 inuenza epidemic in Hebron from German to

English. For many years he wrote reminiscences and

essays for the Littleton (NH) Courier, many compiled

into a slim volume titled Too Far North for Architects.

His musical repertoire was seemingly inexhaustible.

Friends and family remember decades of guitar playing

and singing; until he had Bell's palsy in his 80s, his

melodious whistle could also be heard in operatic arias

and the themes from classical symphonies…

Always an ebullient presence—warm, open-hearted,

tempestuous—Tony was also generous with time and

encouragement for younger scholars, with a special

warm spot for late bloomers. He championed the entry

of women and members of minorities into elds too

long dominated by white men. He believed science was

at its best when it was full of humanity, while life at its

best included plenty of scientic thinking. Together, the

two were like a big house party, spilling out onto the

lawn and lasting well into the night: eusive greetings

and introductions, games of frisbee or poker, children

underfoot, gusts of laughter, beer, singing, and above

all, stories celebrating good science and good people.

[Additional notes by Bill Fitzhugh: The above is a

warm, wonderful tribute to Tony’s life, his professional

accomplishments, and his impact on colleagues and

younger scholars—like me. Also a Dartmouth grad, I

became aware of Tony’s work in Labrador through his

association with Elmer Harp, who brought Tony to

Labrador as a eld assistant in 1949 and 1950, and me

to Hudson Bay in 1967. Tony contributed a petrographic

appendix on Ramah chert to my Ph.D. dissertation,

contributed information leading to discovery of the

Ramah chert quarries on the Torngat coast of northern

Labrador, and, with an assist from his geological mentor,

Everett (Pep) Wheeler, lured me from Hamilton Inlet

to Nain and its archaeological and geological riches.

During the late-70s and early 80s, after I acquired my

own boat, Tony’s and my crews shared research, food,

and home brew whenever we crossed paths around

the Kiglapaits. Later, when I outgrew R/V Tunuyak

and needed al larger, safer vessel, he loaned his pride

and joy—the R/V Pitsiulak—to the Smithsonian for

our 4-year project in Frobisher Bay, Ban Island,

investigating the archaeology of the Martin Frobisher

voyages (1576–1578) in the early 1990s. Then, in 2001,

he and the University of Massachusetts donated Pitsiulak

to the Smithsonian for the Arctic Studies Center’s

continuing research in Labrador and the Quebec Lower

North Shore. For more the thirty years, Tony’s generous

support enabled the ASC to conduct pioneering research,

train new generations of archaeologists and other

‘ologists’, and work with indigenous partners, bringing

the history, cultures, and environments of the Far

Northeast into focus as never before. We hope we have

carried on the tradition established by Tony and his salty

predecessors, Alexander Forbes, Donald MacMillan,

David C. (‘Beany’) Nutt, and countless Inuit who made

their scientic work productive and safe. Tony’s passing

this year is especially poignant because it also marks a

‘goodbye’ to Pitsiulak, a victim of the covid transition

and a time for the ASC to retire from fty-ve years

of northern eld research. Thank you, Tony, for your

inspiration, leadership, and generosity.

(Readers will nd other Newsletter pieces by or about

SAM in ASC Newsletters #24 (2017), 26 (2019), and

28 (2021), and in ‘Adieu Pitsiulak’ in this issue.)

TRIBUTES TO NORMAN HALLENDY (1932–

2023)

By William Fitzhugh

Sometimes it takes an 'outsider' to shake the foundations

of our academic trains of thought. I think of Alexander

Marshack's idea that seemingly random scratches

on Upper Paleolithic bones marked lunar cycles; of

Milankovitch's notion that climate change was forced

by precession of the earth's axis; or of Wegener's

hypothesis about continental drift. Norm was never

trained formally in astronomy or geophysics, or for that

matter in anthropology or archaeology; but his decades

of work with Inuit of southern Ban, and his passion

for exploring stone structures, transformed the way

anthropologists and many others approach the Inuit

landscape. No longer can we entertain the idea that it

can be adequately described or interpreted without Inuit

ASC Newsletter 89

assistance and consultation. His beautiful photography

and sensitive probing for meaning—especially his

lexical recording—among his Inuit friends and elders

opened our eyes to a spiritual, historical, and intellectual

world hidden in seemingly prosaic rock placements,

cairns, alignments, and inuksuks—formations long

known to anthropologists who never realized that to

understand them one had to establish a 'Rasmussen-like'

trust with Inuit that only a

few researchers achieved.

Norm did not solve many

of the riddles behind Inuit

geo-sculpture, but he showed

they had purpose we never

imagined. Norm opened the

door to a world hidden from

outsiders that with the passing

of elders we will never fully

recover. But at least we now

know the Arctic landscape

is lled with physical

manifestations of stories,

meaning, and mystery that

may still be recovered—at

least partially—if one has the

stamina, intuition, sensitivity,

and communication skills of

a Norman Hallendy.

By Alan Morantz

I’ve known Norm since

1994. We worked intensively

and creatively, rst on an

inuential article on inuksuit

for Equinox magazine, then

on his trailblazing book on

the same subject published

a few years later, and most

recently on his memoirs,

An Intimate Wilderness.

More than anyone I know,

Norm embodied the

Walt Whitman poetic

declaration, “I am large,

I contain multitudes.”

Norm could be the most

cantankerous and the most charming man. He was both

artist and scientist. He could hold a room of thousands

spellbound or make himself small to draw others in. He

had no formal education in linguistics, ethnohistory, or

anthropology yet made lasting contributions in each of

those areas.

What compelled Norm to return to the North year after

year, decade after decade? It wasn’t fame or fortune. It

wasn’t escape. It wasn’t some vainglorious endeavour.

The easy answer is that he saw a life purpose in acting

as a ghost writer for Inuit elders whose traditional life

was disappearing. There was certainly aection for the

Cape Dorset elders he befriended; they became a second

family in a sort of parallel universe. Norm grew old with

them. But I think the most compelling explanation is that

Norm was on a lifelong journey of self-discovery, and

for him most roads led North. On several occasions, he

would say to me that, as far

as he was concerned, “the last

great wilderness is yourself.”

In his encounters with the

Inuit elders, he listened a

lot, but he also shared his

own experiences and life

stories. Of his forbears from

Bukovina. Of the traditions

of his grandmother. Of the

seemingly arcane rituals

of the Church. It was a

learning loop: traveling

on the land in all seasons,

Norm would share stories

from his upbringing and life

down south, and the elders

would relate those stories

to their own experiences.

Over time, and against the

backdrop of a spare and

unforgiving environment,

Norm developed a keener

understanding of who he was

and who he wanted to be.

I once asked Norm for

information to include in the

biographical line at the end

of his rst Equinox story. He

wrote back: “I don’t know

who I am. I’m just a person

who went to school, got a

good education, learned how

to observe things well, got a

series of interesting jobs, had

the good fortune of working

with people much smarter

than I, and who continues to derive much pleasure in

discovering things for myself rather than, as Lin Yutang

once said, being carried in the rickshaw of another

man’s labours. Today, we honour and stay goodbye to

Norman Hallendy, explorer of the last great wilderness.

By Louise Terrillon-Mackay, Gatineau

I met Norm in the early 90s when I was Director of

international relations in the Department of Canadian

Norman Hallendy at the McMichael Canadian Art

Collection gallery during the exhibition entitled Sakka:

Observing the Invisible: Photographs by Norman

Hallendy. (McMichael Canadian Art Collection)

Inuksuks in South Ban Island. Photo by Norman

Hallendy

90 ASC Newsletter

Heritage and Chargé de Mission to UNESCO. He came

to me with a proposal to give a lecture and organize

an exhibition of his collection of Inuit Art at the

headquarters of UNESCO in Paris. An exhibit of his

photographs of the Arctic was also shown at the then

Canadian Museum of Civilization, now known as the

Canadian Museum of History. We discussed at length

how to get both exhibits to Europe. It was a long and

complicated process which took a few years.

But the wait was worth it. Norm came to Paris, and

the combined exhibit was placed in the main hall of

UNESCO Headquarters. The lecture was also advertised,

and Norman, who as you all know was a raconteur

extraordinaire, talked for one hour about Inuit culture

and traditions and his experiences and adventures

with his friends in Cape Dorset. The hall was full to

overowing. There had never been such a turn-out for

a lecture at UNESCO! It was also thanks to the help of

Rosamaria Durand, a Canadian who was the Executive

Assistant to the Assistant Director General for Culture at

UNESCO, that the exhibition and lecture happened. She

organized a dinner, and a great evening was had by all

with amenco music played on a guitar by Milagros Del

Corral from Spain. You should have seen Norm dancing

amenco! The photo exhibit toured around Europe

after its stay in Paris and was returned to the Canadian

Museum of Civilization

Norman was a good friend and interested in so many

things. He was even on the Board of the Canadian

Institute for Mediterranean Studies, which I Chair,

for a few years, because of his Italian connection. But

his love for the Arctic was so strong that he returned

his focus to his Inuit friends in the North. We had so

many things to discuss over the years. I will miss our

conversations. He was a very special person, and we

shall all miss him. May you rest in peace Norman, you

deserve it.

Statement by the McMichael Collection

All of us at the McMichael are saddened to hear

of the death of Norman E. Hallendy (1932-2023),

an important ethnographer and photographer who

worked closely with Inuit communities in the North–

especially in Kinngait–for many decades. ⁠Through

six donations consisting of his ethnographic archives

and four donations of Inuit art, Norman supported the

McMichael for over forty years and through his Arctic

research spanning more than 50 years, contributed

signicantly to the preservation of Inuit cultural

heritage in Canada.⁠ We are grateful for Hallendy's

important work and for entrusting us with his legacy.⁠

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection will host a

special event featuring Norman’s life and work on April

13, 2024.

DON E. DUMOND (1929–2023): ARCTIC

SCHOLAR

By Dennis Grin

Don E. Dumond, Arctic

archaeologist, scholar,

professor, and past

director of the University

of Oregon’s Museum

of Natural and Cultural

History, passed away

on June 8th at the age of

94. He was a colleague,

mentor, and friend to

many in the Arctic

academic community, in

addition to the University

of Oregon, with which he

was associated for over 60

years. While publishing

on both Arctic and

Mesoamerica, he spent

decades working at the then Oregon State Museum

of Anthropology, helping to insure its survival when

museums were neither appreciated nor adequately

funded. His perseverance and leadership insured

that the now-named Oregon Museum of Natural and

Cultural History is both thriving and much loved

throughout the Pacic Northwest.

Born in Texas on March 23, 1929, Dumond spent his

formative years in rural New Mexico where his family

had a small livestock ranch. He attended the University

of New Mexico graduating with a degree in English

literature in 1949. Before joining the military, he spent

several months traveling through Mexico. This trip

not only served as the impetus to his life-long interest

in Mexican culture history, but it is where he met his

future wife Carol Steichen, an accomplished artist,

cartographer, and illustrator who drew most of the

maps and gures in his published works.

Don returned from the Air Force, after serving in

both Korea and Japan, and using the GI Bill, attended

Mexico City College where he earned a master’s

degree in Latin American Studies in 1957. There he

took his rst eld archaeology class and excavated at

Teotihuacán. After graduation, Don followed Carol to

Oregon, and enrolled at the University of Oregon’s new

Ph.D. program in Anthropology with Luther Cressman

as his advisor, because—as he told Donald Grayson

(2010, Arctic Anthropology 47(2):1)—"I always

enjoyed the story of things”.

Dumond spent a few summers working in Oregon

before accepting a federal contract to investigate

The way most of us remember

Don: taking a question,

considering, and responding

with a touch of humor. Photo

courtesy: UO/MNCH

ASC Newsletter 91

historical salmon runs in Alaska before the 1880s. This

job brought him to the Alaska Peninsula, which became

the focus for his dissertation. His rst project in 1960

was in Katmai National Park. As he told Don Grayson,

“I wanted to make Alaskan archaeology a story, with

a beginning, a middle, and an end, and Alaska wasn't

complete in my mind yet and wouldn't be for years to

come.” Dumond completed his dissertation in 1962.

Don spent the next four decades working on the

Alaskan Peninsula as well as in Mexico, making major

contributions to the history of both regions. His rst

publication was in 1957, and he continued to publish as

late as 2018. His Arctic publications focused on human

prehistory and demography on the Alaska Peninsula,

but his geographic framework continuously expanded,

taking in southwestern Alaska, the Americas, and

Northeast Siberia. Dumond lived only a few doors

down from the Moss Lab at the museum, and long

after his retirement one could see him walking to the

lab each morning. A prolic writer, he authored the

text book, Eskimos and Aleuts, and published articles

in journals including American Antiquity, American

Anthropologist, Science, Arctic Anthropology, and

Arctic, in addition to numerous monographs in

Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska and

University of Oregon Anthropological Papers series.

Dumond's entire career was spent at the University of

Oregon (UO). He began his graduate studies there in

1959, taught until 1994, serving as department head

from 1972 to 1979, and in 1982 served as the Director

of the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology, now

called the UO’s Museum of Natural and Cultural

History, from which he retired in 1996. During his

teaching years, Dumond served as advisor to more

than 17 graduate students who received their Ph.D.s,

of which I was his last. I had the good fortune to serve

as his teaching assistant during his last two years of

teaching and so was able to witness his interaction with

students considering a career in archaeology. While his

lectures were both detailed and comprehensive and he

expected his students to have read the assigned material

and lectures, his door was always open and his insight

was appreciated by those who approached him

During his long career, Dumond received many

accolades. He was an elected Fellow in the American

Anthropological Association, the Arctic Institute of

North America, and the American Association for

the Advancement of Science, and was elected to

the Sociedad Mexicana de Antropologia. Following

his retirement, he was presented with the Career

Achievement Award of the Alaska Anthropological

Association, the Director’s Lifetime Achievement

Award by the Museum of Natural and Cultural History,

and the Gertrude Bass Warner Award from the Jordan

Schnitzer Museum of Art. He will be missed by many!

ADIEU, PITSIULAK—WELL-TRAVELED

RESEARCH PARTNER!

By William Fitzhugh

This year saw the departure of two old friends: Stearns

A. (Tony) Morse, and his boat-child, R.V. Pitsiulak.

Tony died after a brief illness in January 2024 (see

Morse obit in this Newsletter). Tony was introduced to

Labrador geology by Elmer Harp and David (Beanie)

Nutt and picked up the tradition, dating to David

MacMillan and Robert Peary, of conducting boat-

based research along the rugged Arctic and Subarctic

coasts of the Far Northeast. After a few seasons

traveling around the Kiglapait Mountains north of Nain

with his wife, Dorothy Morse, in canoes and small

outboards, Tony convinced NSF to fund construction

Don in Northeast Siberia in 1990. Photo courtesy: Arctic

Anthropology

Dumond at the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural

and Cultural History. Photo courtesy: UO/MNCH

92 ASC Newsletter

of a vessel built on the lines of a Newfoundland long-

liner, with modications for hosting a research crew

and lab equipment. Pitsiulak (Inuit for sea pigeon or

Black Guillemot) was built in a Lewisport boatyard in

1971. Tony used it to support teams of geologists along

the northern Labrador coast for ten years, gathering

data on the anorthosite intrusion that was at that time

producing dates on some of the oldest rocks in the

world. Tony wrote about his family’s participation on

Pitsiulak trips:

With NSF help we built a 51-foot research vessel

with greenheart sheathing for work in ice. Dorothy

cooked and steered, called out the ice ahead, and

took care of the daughters for several summers.

We used Pitsiulak in Labrador for ten years and

then gave it to the Smithsonian for their Arctic

archaeology studies under William Fitzhugh. Bill

took the ship to Ban Island where for several

summers our youngest daughter Sophie Morse

served as Operations Ocer. (ASC Newsletter 28,

p. 79)

After a gap in funding left

Pitsiulak stranded onshore,

Tony loaned the boat to

support the Smithsonian’s

“Archaeology of the Martin

Frobisher Voyages”

project in Ban Island. Pits

was truly in her element

during the Frobisher

project. Equipped with new

engines and electronics

tted out by Smithsonian,

and with Perry

Colbourne of Lushes

Bight, Newfoundland, as

skipper, we left Newfoundland in 1990 and motored

north along the Labrador coast, crossed turbulent

Hudson Strait, passed Resolution Island, and entered

Frobisher Bay, where we were greeted by 40-foot

tides. In a snowstorm at the end of the rst summer’s

explorations, we hauled her ashore on a cradle built

from steel sent up from Ontario. It took three tractors

to move her a quarter mile up the ats, racing the in-

coming tide! There she sat for three winters alongside

the deteriorating hulk of Max Dunbar’s boat, Calanus,

built in Nova Scotia in 1949 and abandoned on the

Iqaluit beach in the late 1970s. For three more years

we returned to Frobisher with large teams, launched

and hauled Pits, and worked on sites in outer Frobisher

Bay—Kodlunarn Island (Frobisher’s base camp),

Tikkoon, Willows Island, Cyrus Field Bay, and others,

returning to the Port Saunders (Nd) Marine Center in

late August 1993.

Through the 1990s we worked yearly along the

Labrador coast, returning to Port Saunders, where

Bill and Ilene Lowe provided hospitality while we

staged and hauled-out, before we shifted homebase to

the Triton Marine Center, near Springdale, Nd, near

Perry’s home on Long Island. From there, the Labrador

voyages launched and returned until the Smithsonian

and Pitsiulak became household words, while boat

upkeep pumped funds into the local economy.

In 2001, Pits turned her bow west to the Quebec Lower

North Shore (LNS), pursuing knowledge about the

southern boundary of Inuit cultures and their contacts

with 16-17th century Basque whalers. For nineteen

years, she carried teams back and forth along the LNS,

stopping yearly to check out the Norse site at L’Anse

aux Meadows, visit with Boyce Roberts in Quirpon, and

eat a meal at Gina and Adrian Noordhof’s Norseman

restaurant at L’Anse aux Meadows. On the LNS we were

hosted at Brador by Cliord and Florence Hart while

we excavated the Hart Chalet Inuit site, by Christine

and Wilson Evans of

Harrington Harbor while

digging Inuit-Basque sites

at Petit Mécatina, and by

Garland Nadeau and

Eilene Schoeld of St. Paul

River while working on

Inuit and Basque sites there.

Pits and Skipper Perry

threaded these Gulf shores

and shoals for another 19

years while we explored,

excavated, and hosted teams

of University of Montreal

and Smithsonian underwater

archaeologists.

When we returned in 2019 from St. Paul River and

hauled out at Triton, we expected to be back in 2020 for

several more years of work on the LNS, but covid had

other plans. Pits sat ashore for the next two years while

we were unable to reach her, and I sensed the ebbing

of her sea-going days. In 2023, Perry was eligible

for retirement, boat engineering needed upkeep, and

funds for putting her back in shape were no longer

available. For two more years, 2022 and 2023, we

visited and saluted her as we headed o for the LNS,

hauling a trailered speedboat behind Parry’s truck.

Finally, in 2023, with no way for a future launch, Perry

and I cleared our gear out, emptied her fuel tanks, and

presented her to the Triton yard for recycling. Some

parts like her generator, motor and shaft, props, anchor

chain and winch, and guard rails may nd new life on

another vessel.

Pitsiulak underway in Labrador in the mid-1980s

ASC Newsletter 93

Perry’s and my last visit to her was more than

sentimental—it was like saying goodbye to an old,

trusted friend. The hours and miles travelled, the

storms braved—all came rushing back: desperate

hours as the tide dropped her on a sharp rock; the

two terrifying storm-stranded days in Frobisher Bay

when Perry, alone, rode out a storm while we were

caught ashore; a near stranding in the Hamilton

Inlet Backway when a wind-shift set us on a rock

at dinner-time; a falling-tide grounding in the

Fischot Island channel; loosing and regaining towed

speedboats (one of which drifted back to us on her

own!); a bad stormy night at the Blanc Sablon pier;

and the silence of an engine failure in high seas o

St. Paul River. Thanks to Perry’s engineering and

crisis management skills we survived these and other

dicult times. When the chips were down, Perry and

Pits worked things out.

Entering history, Pitsiulak joins a long line of sturdy

vessels that served science along the Newfoundland,

Labrador, and Ban coasts: Nutt’s Blue Dolphin,

MacMillan’s Bowdoin, Dunbar’s Calanus, and

former ASC vessels, Qilaluak and Tunuyak. All

hosted countless teams of researchers; all became

familiar and famous (or infamous!) to local

residents; and all created legends recorded in our

logbooks and work reports. Pitsiulak, like Bowdoin

(which was rebuilt and still serves the Maine

Maritime Academy as a training ship), served a great

number of students and scientists, from its Morse

and Smithsonian days from 1971 to 2019. She will

be remembered by all who sailed with her and those

ashore who knew of her.

2023 ASC STAFF PUBLICATIONS

Biddison, Dawn

Batuk’enelyashi: Natural Dyes from Dena’ina Lands.

15 videos featuring knowledge shared by Sugpiaq/

Iñupiaq Master Artist June Simeono Pardue and her

apprentice/granddaughter Destinee VonScheele.

Batuk’enelyashi: Natural Dyes from Dena’ina Lands.

50-page instructional booklet accompanying the video

set. (June Simeono Pardue and Dawn Biddison)

Coming Home: Reclaiming Ahtna Knowledge through

Museum Collections, edited by Dawn Biddison with

illustrations and designs by 80% Studios.

Making Connections: Athabascan Lifeways and

You. 36-page educational activities booklet featuring

Smithsonian collections and Athabascan research.

(Melissa Shagino and Dawn Biddison, illustrations

and designs by 80% Studios)

Cloud, John

Le Rendez-Vous de Virginie. In: Kowalski, Jean-Marie,

Chaline, Olivier., L'Amiral de Grasse et l'Indépendance

Américaine. Paris, France: Sorbonne Université

Presses, (Histoire Maritime) pp. 287-325. (Cloud, John

and Oliver Chaline)

Crowell, Aron

Climate Change and Pulse Migration: Intermittent

Chugach Inuit Occupation of Glacial Fiords on the

Kenai Coast, Alaska. Frontiers in Environmental

Archaeology 2:1145220. (Aron L. Crowell and Mayumi

Arimitsu)

The Truth of Oral Tradition: Multisource Conrmation

of Northern Indigenous Histories. In On Melting

Ground: Arctic Archaeology, ed. J. Beutmann, S.

Hansen, C. Michel, S. Reinhold, and S. Wolfram.

Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin.

Driscoll Engelstad, Bernadette

Inuit Clothing Design: Art Across Time. In Inuit

Sanaugangit: Art Across Time, edited by Darlene Wight

and Jocelyn Piirainen, eds. Winnipeg, MB: Winnipeg

Art Gallery.

Fitzhugh, William W.

Archaeology of the North American Arctic. In: Nikita,

E., Rehren, T. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Archaeology,

2nd Edition, vol. 3, pp. 337–366, London: Academic

Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-90799-

6.00207-X.

Captain Perry Colbourne beside the vessel he rebuilt several

times, when both retired in 2023, in Triton, Newfoundland.

Photo by Bill Fitzhugh

94 ASC Newsletter

Archaeology of Bronze Age Mongolia: A Deer Stone

Diary. 277pp. Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian

Institution, and Inuit Press International.

Smithsonian 2022 Surveys in Northwest Newfoundland

and Testing a Basque Whaling Station in St. Paul

River, Quebec. A Field Report. Arctic Studies Center,

Smithsonian Institution. Wash., D.C. (Fitzhugh,

William, Sarai Barreiro-Argüelles, Francisco Rivera

Amaro, and Ben Fitzhugh)

Exploring a Basque Whaling Tryworks at Bonne

Espérance-4, St. Paul River, Quebec. 2022 Permit

Report to the Quebec Ministry of Culture and

Communication. (Fitzhugh, William W., Sarai Barreiro-

Argüelles, and Francisco Rivera Amaro)

On the Question of the Tent Rings, Caribou, and Inuit

in Northwest Newfoundland. Provincial Archaeology

Oce 2022 Annual Review. Pp. 7-17. (Barreiro-

Argüelles, S., William W. Fitzhugh, Brad Loewen, Ben

Fitzhugh, and Dongya Yang)

A Small Basque Whaling Station in St. Paul River,

Quebec. Provincial Archaeology Oce 2022 Annual

Review: 109-115. (Fitzhugh, William W., Sarai

Barreiro-Argüelles, and Francisco Rivera Amaro)

Conjuring Mongolian Deer Stones: Biographical

Statuary of Bronze Age Central Asia and South Siberia.

Current World Archaeology 117 (Jan-Feb.):1-26.

(William W. Fitzhugh and Richard Kortum)

Deer Stones and the Bronze to Iron Age Transition

in Mongolia. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual

International Mongolian Studies Conference, May 12-

13, 2023, Ed. G. Dashlkhagvan, pp. 83-89. Wash,, D.C.

Krupnik, Igor

George Noongwook (1949–2023). Arctic 76(2): 239–

242. (H. P. Huntington, I. Krupnik, and H. Ikuta)

Yupik Elder Broke Ground in Whaling, Culture and

Research. Indian Country Today (online December 13,

2023). (H. Huntington, I. Krupnik, and H. Ikuta.)

J. Louis Giddings: Photographs from St. Lawrence

Island, Alaska: A Haenreer Hidden ‘Trove’.

Contexts. Annual Report of the Haenreer Museum of

Anthropology 46: 36-37.

Loring, Stephen

To Bring Back the Summer”: Seeking a Concordance

Between Innu History and Archaeology. The Oxford

Handbook of Global Indigenous Archaeologies, edited

by Claire Smith, Joe Watkins, et al. Published on-line,

26 January 2023. (Chelsee Arbour, Stephen Loring,

Anthony Jenkinson, Napes Ashini)

Palomino, Elisa

Indigenous Arctic Fish Skin Heritage: Sustainability,

Craft and Material Innovation. Ph.D. Thesis. Univ. of

the Arts, London. https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/

id/eprint/20124/

Digital Tools in the Fashion Industry: Fish Skin

Garments and Ainu Fish Skin Traditions'. A.

Schramme, and N. Verboven (eds.). Routledge.

(Palomino, E. Karmon, A. Topaz, O., Solo, A.,

Cordoba, A.)

Smith, Kevin

All that Glitters is not Gold: Multi-instrumental

Identication of Viking Age Orpiment (As2S3) from

Surtshellir Cave, Iceland. Journal of Archaeological

Science Reports 47: 103724 (K. Smith and G.

Ólafsson)

Wol, Christopher

Scaling Up and Hunkering Down: The Evolution of

Beothuk Houses and Households. North American

Archaeologist 44(4): 146-175. (D.H. Holly, jr., J. C.

Erwin, C.B. Wol, S. H. Hull, A. Samuels, and J.

Brake)

The Maritime Archaic Occupation of Inspector Island:

New Survey and Evidence. PAO Archaeological

Review, 21: 322-325. (C.B. Wol, D. H. Holly, Jr., K.

Farley, Z. Huelskamp, and A. Lovett)

ASC Newsletter 95

Contact Information

Arctic Studies Center

Department of Anthropology

Natural History Building, MRC 112

Smithsonian Institution

P.O. Box 37012

10th and Constitution Ave. N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20013-7012

(202) 633-1887 (phone) (202) 357-2684 (fax)

ASC Anchorage Oce

Anchorage Museum

625 C Street Anchorage, AK 99501

(907) 929-9207

Arctic Studies Center homepage

https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/anthropology/programs/arctic-studies-center

ASC X Account: @arcticstudies

ASC Facebook Account: https://www.facebook.com/ArcticStudiesCenter/

Captain Perry Colbourne and Pitsiulak at Petit Mecatina,

2004. Photo by Bill Fitzhugh

A lobster feast in St. Paul River, Quebec, 2019.

Photo by Bill Fitzhugh

Supporting Archaeology in Frobisher Bay, Ban Island,

1992. Photo by Bill Fitzhugh

Harrington Harbor, 2005. Photo by Bill Fitzhugh

Arctic Studies Center

Department of Anthropology

Natural History Building, MRC 112

Smithsonian Institution

P.O. Box 37012

10th and Constitution, NW

Washington, DC 20013-7012

Ocial Business

Penalty for Private Use $300

Presorted Standard

Postage & Fees Paid

Smithsonian Institution

G-94

This newsletter was edited by William Fitzhugh,

Igor Krupnik, Stephen Loring, Aron Crowell, Dawn

Biddison and Nancy Shorey.

Designed and produced by

Nancy Shorey and Igor Chechushkov

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

Archaeology of the North American Arctic

Chapter

Jan 2023

William W. Fitzhugh

All that glitters is not gold: Multi-instrumental identification of Viking Age orpiment (As2S3) from Surtshellir cave, Iceland

Article

Feb 2023
JASR

Fragments of orpiment (As2S3) from a Viking Age structure inside Iceland’s Surtshellir cave represent the farthest-known occurrence of this rare mineral from sources known to have been exploited during the Early Middle Ages. Actual fragments of orpiment (from Latin auripigmentum, golden pigment) are only documented in late first millennium AD northern Europe from Dunadd, the seat of the Dalriadic kings in western Scotland (7th-8th century AD), Tonymore Crannóg, an elite Irish site (8th-9th century AD), and now Surtshellir (AD 920–1020). Ground to create a pigment, orpiment was used to add brilliant yellows to illuminated manuscripts produced from the 7th-10th centuries AD in elite monastic and ecclesiastic centers of Ireland, the Carolingian Empire, and Anglo-Saxon England. Its only prior documented uses in Viking Age Scandinavia, however, are from the furnishings of King Gorm’s grave at Jelling (Denmark), ca. AD 950–960, and possibly the Gokstad ship, ca. AD 900–905. The twelve fragments of orpiment from Surtshellir, verified through pXRF (hand-held X-Ray Fluorescence) and SEM/EDS (Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy), link this site to 10th century AD interaction and trade networks that stretched from the North Atlantic to Anatolia and provide supportive evidence for re-interpreting the cave as an important, elite-controlled ritual site from Iceland’s Viking Age. NB: The published version of this article is available without charge until 20 January 2023 through the following link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1gAq6_,5MKXACN3

Oxford) reprinted as Marine Conservation: Science, Policy, and Management in 2014. The world of marine conservation and of marine mammal science will be a different space without one of its last dedicated 'naturalists

Jan 2004

Carleton was one of the very few contemporary scholars who proudly called himself a 'natural historian' or a 'naturalist.' He always professed an integrative vision and stressed the myriad links among environment, marine mammals, and people who live by hunting them. He contributed a great chapter titled "Arctic Crashes: A Naturalist's General Perspective" to our Arctic Crashes volume (Krupnik and Crowell 2020), in which he articulated his vision. Together with his wife Jerry, he published an award-winning textbook, Coastal-Marine Conservation: Science and Policy (2004, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford) reprinted as Marine Conservation: Science, Policy, and Management in 2014. The world of marine conservation and of marine mammal science will be a different space without one of its last dedicated 'naturalists.' He will be greatly missed, and our deep sympathy goes to his wife of 46 years, Dr. Jerry McCormick-Ray.

Natural Dyes from Dena'ina Lands. 15 videos featuring knowledge shared by Sugpiaq/ Iñupiaq Master Artist June Simeonoff Pardue and her apprentice/granddaughter Destinee VonScheele

Batuk

Batuk'enelyashi: Natural Dyes from Dena'ina Lands. 15 videos featuring knowledge shared by Sugpiaq/ Iñupiaq Master Artist June Simeonoff Pardue and her apprentice/granddaughter Destinee VonScheele.

Bernadette Inuit Clothing Design: Art Across Time

Driscoll Engelstad

Driscoll Engelstad, Bernadette Inuit Clothing Design: Art Across Time. In Inuit Sanaugangit: Art Across Time, edited by Darlene Wight and Jocelyn Piirainen, eds. Winnipeg, MB: Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Giddings: Photographs from St

J Louis

J. Louis Giddings: Photographs from St. Lawrence Island, Alaska: A Haffenreffer Hidden 'Trove'.

To Bring Back the Summer": Seeking a Concordance Between Innu History and Archaeology. The Oxford Handbook of Global Indigenous Archaeologies

Jan 2023

Stephen Loring

Loring, Stephen To Bring Back the Summer": Seeking a Concordance Between Innu History and Archaeology. The Oxford Handbook of Global Indigenous Archaeologies, edited by Claire Smith, Joe Watkins, et al. Published on-line, 26 January 2023. (Chelsee Arbour, Stephen Loring, Anthony Jenkinson, Napes Ashini)

The Evolution of Beothuk Houses and Households

146-175

Christopher Scaling Wolff
Hunkering Up
Down

Wolff, Christopher Scaling Up and Hunkering Down: The Evolution of Beothuk Houses and Households. North American Archaeologist 44(4): 146-175. (D.H. Holly, jr., J. C. Erwin, C.B. Wolff, S. H. Hull, A. Samuels, and J. Brake)

The Maritime Archaic Occupation of Inspector Island: New Survey and Evidence

322-325

C B Wolff
D H Holly
K Farley
Z Huelskamp
A Lovett

The Maritime Archaic Occupation of Inspector Island: New Survey and Evidence. PAO Archaeological Review, 21: 322-325. (C.B. Wolff, D. H. Holly, Jr., K. Farley, Z. Huelskamp, and A. Lovett)

Calibrating 55 Years of Radiocarbon Dates from Labrador

Abstract

Recommended publications

Calibrating 55 Years of Radiocarbon Dates from Labrador

Vikings, Volcanoes, and Ragnarök: The Archaeology of Surtshellir, Iceland

Contexts: Annual Report of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, v. 41 (2016)

Geochemically Tracking the Earliest European Explorers in North America: Investigations of a New Jas...