IPB

( Log In ) Log In is for TREC Teachers & Researchers only

 
Reply to this topicStart new topic
> July 23 – Iturup Island (part 2), or Do we finally get to get off the boat?! YES!!!!
Misty_Nikula_Ohlsen
post Jul 27 2006, 10:07 PM
Post #1


Advanced Member
***

Group: TREC Team
Posts: 134
Joined: 18-April 06
Member No.: 31



July 23 – Iturup Island
or Do we finally get to get off the boat?! YES!!!!

Sunday, 23 July – Aboard the Gipanis, offshore of Berezovka on Iturup Island
9:00 pm


What a long day! We had two trips ashore today. If we thought we weren’t doing enough, we made up for some of that today. Early this morning, about 4 am, we pulled anchor and began moving to our target site, Tikhaya River, about halfway down Iturup on the Sea of Okhotsk side. We arrived at about 9 am and prepared to go ashore. By 9:30 the first group was ashore and had a fair idea where the archaeological site was located. By 10:00 we were in a holding pattern.

As soon as Dr. Shubin had headed back to the ship to get the second group, we heard a loud mechanical noise of a tractor trailer headed our way. About 4 km from our landing zone was a Russian Coast Guard station and as soon as they saw our zodiac coming ashore, they came to meet us and see what we were doing. We met two Russian soldiers, complete with camouflage uniforms and weapons, on the top of a rise, gave them our passports and entry cards as requested and waited for the rest of our team to come ashore. Of course, Dr Shubin dropped off the second group and then headed by zodiac over to the station to present our papers, not knowing that we were over the hill, waiting for him. One of the soldiers left to go back to the station and the other, who didn’t speak any English, stayed with us.

About 30 minutes later, Dr. Shubin returned, explained to the soldier that we were authorized to be there and we got to work. The remaining soldier stayed the whole day and monitored our activities. I’m sure that he must have thought that we were very crazy Americans.

Iturup is bear territory, so we weren’t surprised that while we were waiting for our clearance from the soldiers that we saw a brown bear shuffling around and foraging about 1.5-2 miles away, on a ridge near the beach. We watched him for awhile through binoculars. He was extremely cute! (mostly because he was so far away)

The area that we were working, once you got past the beach sand dunes and grassy areas, was thickly covered with wildflowers and grasses. There were orange Asiatic lilies, purple irises, wild roses, thistles in bloom, a flower that looked like a white Astilbe and one that looked like Queen Anne’s lace. Some of this dense vegetation was nearly 4 feet tall in places! It was very beautiful.

We split up into a few groups. Ben, Dena, Matt, and Mike, all worked on digging test pits. In a nutshell, a test pit is a way of digging down near, but not actually in, a known site, such as a pit house, so that you can determine at what depths there are archaeological artifacts without disturbing the site itself. So it is a way of assessing the location(s) of artifacts and what time culture they are from with just a few representative pieces and a “minimal” amount of digging. I say minimal in quotation marks, because these test pits are not necessarily small in size. Each of the two test pits dug (and then filled back in) was 1 meter wide by 3 meters long and went down about 1.5 meters. Each one was dug about 3 meters outside of edge of a former pit house site. Much of the dirt that is removed is laboriously sifted through mesh screens to separate out small bits and pieces. (See the picture below – left)

They didn’t find any artifacts or charcoal in the first pit. In the second one, they didn’t find anything until they were 80 cm below the surface and then it was just a few small flakes from the making of stone tools and a couple of stone points. Compared to yesterday’s cornucopia of artifacts, this seemed like a bust, but Mike said that this is more typical archaeology. It’s usually much more difficult, but can be more rewarding because the items are located in context.

Jody, Bre, Jesse, Dr Shubin and his son, Dima, all headed about a kilometer away to a nearby lake to try some peat coring. I don’t know much about what they discovered or how it works right now. But will tell you about it the next time, when I will probably go with them.

James, Beth and I worked on finding some more partially exposed soil stratigraphy to excavate and then describe the profile. We wanted to find some of the same tephra layers (deposits made by volcanic eruptions) that we had found yesterday, so that we could correlate the stratigraphy between the two sites. We dug a profile excavation and described it in Beth’s notebook. We looked for quite a while, but couldn’t definitively locate the tephra layers that we had seen at the first site, unfortunately.

At about 1:30 pm, we all came back to the beach and had a quick lunch. When we got back to work, James, Beth and I headed over to the Tikhaya River. On the way, I found my first Japanese glass float! It was a small one and it didn’t have any identifying marks, but I was very excited! We waded up through the stream in our hip waders looking for exposed riverbanks or any artifacts that might be washed out into the stream. We found a few stone flakes and some not very old (maybe 50 years) pottery pieces and a lot of modern garbage (it’s everywhere!) in the stream and did some quick notes on an exposure before we had to return to the beach. We were all headed back to the ship at 4 pm.

We soon discovered why we had come back so early. Turns out that the plan was to head about an hour south to our next site, run ashore really quickly, check it out and decide if we were going to stay tomorrow. So instead of changing out of our dirty clothes and taking showers before dinner, like we were all thinking, we stayed in them and waited to get back in the zodiac. On the way south, we went past this huge caldera, about 3 km in diameter. It is called L’Vynaya Past and apparently this huge volcanic eruption occurred 7500 years ago.

We also saw a pod of orcas off the starboard bow, surfacing and feeding, and watched them for about 10 minutes. Very cool.

Of course, an hour south, turned out to be nearly 2 hours and it wasn’t until after 7 pm that we were headed back to shore in the zodiac to a site called Berezovka. We walked around for just over an hour through a site that had a deflation lag deposit with lots of stone flakes, found some deposits of bone and charcoal within a dune that we can excavate, another area with Jomon pottery pieces that were not in context and all of this was overlaid by a modern Coast Guard station that had burned down quite awhile ago, so there was old bricks and coal and other debris everywhere. We had time to collect some cursory artifacts, take a few pictures and decided that we definitely need to come back and spend the day there tomorrow. On our way back to the shore, we spotted an Arctic fox. He was a bit mangy looking, but didn’t seem particularly frightened by our presence, though he kept his distance. (See picture below – right)

We headed back to the ship and FINALLY ate dinner. It was a much deserved meal, even if it wasn’t until 8:30. We all gratefully thanked the cook as well as we could (she doesn’t speak English) for keeping it warm for us. Then after completing the cataloguing and documenting and then cleaning ourselves up (which included our first trip to the sauna!) we all are hitting the sack to prepare for tomorrow!

IPB Image
On the left: Ben Fitzhugh and James Taylor work in the second test pit at the Tikhaya River site. In this test pit, some artifacts were found at a depth of 80 cm.
On the right: A fairly mangy looking Arctic fox that we saw roaming around on the beach at the Berezovka site.


More in a couple of days!
Mrs. N-O
User is offlineProfile CardPM
Go to the top of the page
+Quote Post

Reply to this topicStart new topic
1 User(s) are reading this topic (1 Guests and 0 Anonymous Users)
0 Members:

 



- NSF Acknowledgment & Disclaimer Time is now: 28th March 2024 - 10:49 AM