In 1960, a doctoral student from California conducted an archaeological dig at a coastal site in southwest Alaska.

It was old-school archaeology, archaeologist as auteur. He excavated, took away more than 4,000 items including three sets of human remains, and in his dissertation characterized the site as a midden — essentially a dump — although his own field drawings suggested that a good-sized settlement had previously existed there.

More than 50 years later, in 2011, another doctoral student — an Alaska Native and future ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professor — brought a very different style of archaeology to the site, known as Temyiq Tuyuryaq in the native Yup’ik language and Old Togiak in English.

Archaeologist and Lecturer in Anthropology Kristen Barnett. (Theophil Syslo/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Kristen Barnett, in contrast to the 1960 visitor, returned to her native state to conduct what’s called indigenous archaeology: research that’s collaborative, driven by the needs and interests of the indigenous host community, and that addresses inequities in archaeological practice.

The community in this case, located across Bristol Bay from the archaeological site, is the Yup’ik village of Tuyuryaq, or Togiak. A lecturer in anthropology at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ since 2016, Barnett has twice brought students to Togiak for fieldwork.

And now Barnett’s achievements in indigenous archaeology have been recognized with major grant funding from the National Science Foundation: She recently received a three-year grant from the NSF worth $706,000 in cash and equipment to continue that work.

The grant is the foundation’s first, Barnett notes, to support what’s known as a research sovereignty model, in which “indigenous peoples engage with scientific study as active participants and sovereign decision-makers, rather than passive objects of study.�

During an 2017 anthropology Short Term course taught by Kristen Barnett, students head to work at an archaeological site in Old Togiak, Alaska. (Kristen Barnett/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Her Togiak project is “deeply ingrained in the community in every sense,� she says. Crucially, the research is guided by the residents’ interest in the ways their ancestors lived — including their adaptations to climate and ecology, responses to colonial influence, and, as Barnett says, how the ancestral culture is continued in “the traditions and practices of their contemporary descendants.�

‘A cousin village to my own’

Starting in the late 19th century, inhabitants of Old Togiak began crossing the bay and resettling at the site of today’s village.

A grassy shore with striking views of mountains across the water, Togiak sits at the top of Bristol Bay. There’s plenty of wind and precipitation, and temperature extremes range from the high 60s in July to the low teens in the winter. (Barnett’s pre-trip instructions to her Short Term students include a warning to leave the cotton socks at home — this is a place for wool.)

“Everybody knew that if an archeologist was there, it meant that things had been taken.�

The village is accessible only by water or air. Getting there from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ takes a series of flights, the last requiring a charter plane that holds six, necessitating multiple trips to get the full complement of a Short Term class there from the nearest large settlement, Dillingham (pop. approximately 2,400).

Salmon and herring are abundant, supporting both traditional subsistence lifestyles and a Togiak Fisheries cannery at the archaeological site — “built on top of the old village,� says Barnett.

About 85 percent of the residents are Alaska Native, as is Barnett. A member of Alaska’s Unangax (or Aleut) people, inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands and coastal mainland shared with Yup’ik territory, she describes Togiak as “kind of a cousin village to my own.�

During the 2018 experiential learning week at the Togiak School, local and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students learn to map with GPS. (Kristen Barnett/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Barnett was a doctoral student at the University of Montana when she first conducted research there, in 2011. “I wanted to go home and work in my own community,� she says. Given the 1960 research effort, “this seemed like an obvious place to start.�

The 2011 visit led her to recover some of the items removed from the old village in 1960, including the human remains. Not many Togiak residents knew about the old dig 50 years after the fact — but nevertheless, Barnett says, “everybody knew that if an archeologist was there, it meant that things had been taken.�

She says, “We spent a year and a half tracking things down. And after the repatriation of those, the Traditional Council of Togiak decided that they wanted to explore more archeology there as a way of reclaiming their former village as a village rather than a dump.�

With NSF support, Barnett returned in 2015 to conduct preliminary geophysical work — soil core sampling, and subsurface and surface mapping. She joined ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 2016, and brought 12 students to Togiak for Short Term in 2017.

A fox skull in the grid in a 2018 point-plotting exercise. (Kristen Barnett/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

That visit and a second one, last spring, each began with a week in Togiak, coinciding with a scheduled experiential learning week at the K-12 Togiak School. The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ team resided at the school, gave local students a hands-on introduction to archaeology — and reversed roles with the locals when they could.

“We tried to incorporate activities where they were also teaching us,â€� such as village tours in which the Togiak students kids pointed out places meaningful to them, says one of the seven students who went in 2018, Carter Ros ’21 of Hailey, Idaho. (Six were taking the course and another student went along as a research assistant.) The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ group also ate seal and beaver caught and cooked by the Togiak students.

Fieldwork at Old Togiak followed the village stays. In addition to soil sampling, that work included site mapping that used GPS to assign coordinates to such landmarks as former houses. (The traditional houses consisted of circular pits roofed over with logs and sod, and decades after abandonment, what’s left are depressions often concealed by tall coarse grass.) This past year, the group laid a grid for excavation and even started to dig, but was thwarted by rain.

“We tried to incorporate activities where they were also teaching us.�

As a matter of fact, though, Barnett hadn’t originally intended to excavate at all. But at the end of the 2017 visit, the village’s Traditional Council invited her to come back and excavate — an invitation that resulted in the current NSF grant.

The 2017 visit was pivotal in another way: Three local students took part in the Old Togiak fieldwork and, Barnett says, their contributions “changed everything.� Their knowledge of the site’s stories and history threw into sharp relief the cultural conflict that has shaped so many places like Togiak: the clash between native communities and colonial expansion.

The Togiak students knew which families had owned buildings still standing in the old village. Something that “looked like just a piece of aluminum roofing in tall grass used to be a fish drying rack that belonged to a specific family.�

And, Barnett says, “there were numerous stories about the building of the cannery — skulls and long bones just coming out of disturbed burial sites.â€� (Two of the three Togiak students are at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ this week, attending A Model for Decolonizing Learning on College Campuses, an international conference organized by Barnett. An additional $50,000 NSF grant is supporting the conference.)

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Togiak students learn the basics of excavation together during the 2018 experiential learning week. (Kristen Barnett/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

At the time of the 2001 Census, there were about 24,000 Yup’ik in the U.S., most of them in Alaska. (A different source adds that about 1,700 live in Russia.) Historically, Barnett explains, archaeologists have tended to think of the Yup’ik mostly in terms of who they are and how they live today — in a sense, severing them from their past.

But a site like Old Togiak bolsters the argument for taking the long view. As Barnett points out, radiocarbon dating has produced evidence of human activity taking place there as long as 3,000 years ago.

“Instead of going in with preconditioned ideas, we can actually look at the community in terms of a cultural landscape. We can think about the stories of elders — there are elders in the village who were raised over at the old village in pit houses — and think about the community a little bit differently,” she says.

Until recent years and the advent of indigenous archaeology, says Barnett’s student Carter Ros, “it’s just been archeologists going in, excavating someone else’s culture, and saying, ‘This is what happened and this is what went on here.’

“People like Kristen are starting to change that. It was refreshing to see how archeology could function, and do so much good, within a community.�

After all, Barnett says, “If we’re not integrating with community needs, we should probably rethink what we’re doing.�

The Bristol Bay Air Service plane that brought the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ group on the final leg to Togiak in 2017. (Kristen Barnett/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Bruce Bourque, senior lecturer in anthropology at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and curator of archaeology at the Maine History Museum, talks about his new book, The Swordfish Hunters: The History and Ecology of an Ancient American Sea People.

Produced by Phyllis Graber Jensen with Doug Hubley.

Eight years ago, a landmark article in the journal Science — contributed to by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ archeologist Bruce Bourque — offered a pair of conclusions that altered our understanding of marine ecosystems.

First, humans had been depleting marine ecosystems far longer than anyone thought, practically since we learned to fish. Second, our management of marine ecosystems had failed to take into account the once-incredible abundance, like Columbus seeing the Caribbean swarming with sea turtles, of fish and other marine vertebrates.

Bourque’s contribution was based on excavations of shell middens at Turner Farm, a 5,000-year-old indigenous settlement on the Penobscot Bay island of North Haven. There, he found evidence that prehistoric fishermen, using nothing more than bone hooks and hand nets, were able to deplete the nearshore population of Atlantic cod. For example, cod went from 74 percent of all fish bone fragments 4,350 years ago to just 2 percent 400 years ago.

For Bourque and colleague Beverly Johnson, associate professor of geology, these ancient fish bones continue to yield clues not just about the past, but also about how to manage Maine’s coastal fisheries.

Any effort to conserve marine resources is faced with “shifting baselines” — an uncertainty about what a healthy marine ecosystem actually looks like.

For example, if prehistoric fishermen could overfish the cod stock, it’s little surprise that Maine’s marine ecosystems have been so drastically altered over the past century by modern fishing techniques. Today, fisheries regulators are constantly deploying various conservation strategies and tactics. Areas of the Gulf of Maine have been placed off limits. Fishing days and trip limits have been reduced. Rules about fishing gear and fish sizes are constantly changing.

But any effort to conserve marine resources, says Bourque, is faced with “shifting baselines” — an uncertainty about what a healthy marine ecosystem actually looks like.

“Restore fish to what level?” asks Bourque, a lecturer in anthropology at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and chief archeologist for the Maine State Museum. “If the baseline is the 1950s, you’ve already got a collapsed cod stock. Is that where you want to set the baseline? Probably not.”

To help establish a better baseline understanding of the Maine prehistoric coastal ecosystem, Bourque and Bev Johnson, a geochemist, conducted isotopic analyses on some of Bourque’s archive of 20,000 fish and human bones from the Turner Farm site.

Such analyses — done at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ — can often determine, among other things, what these animals and humans ate. When Johnson’s students perform isotopic analyses of their own fingernail clippings, for example, “it is possible to discern vegans from omnivores, and students who summer in Europe from those who don’t,” she says.

As they looked at the Turner site human bones, they learned that these ancient people mostly ate fish and shellfish (more often than deer and bear), further supporting the idea that prehistoric fishermen could have locally fished down their local ecosystem.

On the marine side, Johnson and Bourque gained greater understanding of the ancient coastal food web — the complex who-eats-what relationship among predators and prey, from cod at the top down to “primary producers,” like kelp and seagrass, that fuel the base of the food web.

The researchers found little change in this food web from about 4,350 years ago to the more recent past. Then, around 400 years ago, the isotopic analyses revealed a fundamental change at the base of the web: Kelp or seagrass was disappearing.

“It begged to be further investigated,” says Johnson.

She had an inkling. Given that kelp currently dominates nearshore food webs, she wondered if seagrass was once much more abundant and more important to the food web than it is today.

Last year, Johnson chased this question all the way to Denmark. During her sabbatical as a Phillips Fellow, she worked with Don Canfield of the University of Southern Denmark, once again analyzing Bourque’s fish bones. This time, she did an isotopic analysis for sulfur. (Carbon and nitrogen analyses were done at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.)

For Johnson, adding to what’s known about an ecosystem at the cusp of human involvement is as good as it gets.

The results confirmed Johnson’s hunch. From about 4,350 years ago to 400 years ago, seagrass was as important as kelp to Maine’s nearcoastal marine food web. From that idea, she infers that seagrass was itself more plentiful in prehistoric times than it is today. And if seagrass was once key to the pristine Maine coastal food web, then logically “we need to restore and preserve current seagrass beds,” says Johnson.

For Johnson, adding to what’s known about an ecosystem at the cusp of human involvement is as good as it gets. “My whole background is about understanding the long-term record of change, and seeing what happens when humans come on the scene,” she says. “In Maine there are tons of these opportunities.”

Generally, it’s thought that seagrass began its decline with the arrival of Europeans, perhaps due to increase in water turbidity due to settlement. The questions, of course, keep coming. Was the historical decline in seagrass a local or regional phenomenon? What was the exact timing of this change? In fact, Johnson, Bourque, and colleagues like ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ biologist Will Ambrose and Robert Steneck of the University of Maine are seeking National Science Foundation funding to support further research.

Ultimately, it’s just another lesson in appreciating complexity and how the past informs the present, says Bourque. “The Gulf of Maine was hugely more rich prehistorically than it was at the turn of the 20th century,” says Bruce Bourque. “You just cannot understand marine ecosystems over a short period of time.”

By Edgar Allen Beem, photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen
Freelance writer Edgar Allen Beem of Yarmouth is the author of “Backyard Maine: Local Essays by Edgar Allen Beem.” This story references research by Beverly Johnson, Bruce Bourque, and Robert Steneck of the University of Maine initially published in “Human Impacts on Ancient Marine Ecosystems” (2008) in the chapter “Possible Prehistoric Fishing Effects on Coastal Marine Food Webs in the Gulf of Maine.”

In Kongsfjorden on the west side of Svalbard, Will Ambrose (facing) and Kelton McMahon ’05 haul a dredge to collect Serripes groenlandicus and other clam species for McMahon’s thesis in 2004. Photograph by Glenn Lopez, SUNY–Stony Brook.

Professor Will Ambrose, a bearded biologist specializing in Arctic sea-floor ecology, is a pioneer in the science of deciphering the past — including past climates — by studying the annual hard-tissue accretions of organisms such as mollusks.

As an expert in sclerochronology, Ambrose has discovered a link between Arctic clam growth and regular shifts in the region’s climate. In short, Arctic clams grow more rapidly during regimes of warm and wet weather and less during cold and dry regimes. This sensitivity to climate change, says Ambrose, makes the humble bivalve a “sentinel of climate change.�

While Ambrose is collaborating on no fewer than five clamshell research projects at the moment, the scientific paper that detailed the initial findings of a correlation between climate change and Arctic clamshells appeared in Global Change Biology in September 2006.

Seen here is the cross section of a small portion of aSerripes groenlandicus shell, near the umbo, or hinge. The lines indicate annual growth: dark lines for slow winter growth; light areas indicate fast summer growth. For an image showing the complete shell, click the image above. Will Ambrose has discovered a correlation between growth and climate shifts. This image is a composite of 18 images produced by the College’s new Imaging and Computing Center using a Nikon SMZ 1500 stereo microscope. Collected in 1926, the shell’s actual length is 2.5 inches.

The paper emerged from work done three years earlier, when Ambrose dispatched divers to the bottom of a high Arctic fjord in the Svalbard archipelago, a popular Arctic research site about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. From the ocean bottom, the divers returned with four Greenland cockles (Serripes groenlandicus).

After encasing the shells in epoxy and slicing them apart, Ambrose and a team of scientists, including Kelton McMahon ’05, analyzed the growth bands. First, the team found that growth bands were indeed deposited annually. Then the team was able to correlate annual differences in shell growth with a measurement of Arctic weather oscillations known as the Arctic Climate Regime Index.

“What makes the work exciting,� says Ambrose, interviewed in his cluttered office on Carnegie’s third floor, “is that this is the first time in the Arctic that we’ve been able to track a large-scale climatic oscillation and see that large-scale regional event reflected in animals living on the bottom.�

While scientists have for decades analyzed growth lines in shells (Ambrose and others call them “trees of the sea�) in order to reconstruct past environments, the intensity around climate-change research has “really made the field of sclerochronology take off,� he says.

In this hot field, Ambrose’s research is distinctive for its location, on the Arctic continental shelf. “A lot of the work has been done at lower latitudes, mostly because it’s harder to get clams in the Arctic and there are simply fewer people available to help,� he says. “That’s why we’re ahead of the ball.�

If it’s true that Arctic clams grow faster in warmer weather (and grow faster when there’s less of a seasonal ice pack, another signal that Ambrose saw hints of), a simplistic response might be, “Great — fatter clams for walruses to munch on.� But, explains Ambrose, fat clams won’t offset the problems walruses are having due to less pack ice to rest on. And less ice will also affect tiny creatures inside the ice that are the first link in a food chain for polar cod, seabirds, and seals. And so on, throughout the Arctic food web.

These Serripes groenlandicus clams were collected in Storfjord at a site last visited by 19th-century Russian explorers. Photograph by Greg Henkes '08.

In the end, changes in water temperature and salinity (due to runoff from melting glaciers) and increased sea levels, leading to erosion and turbidity, will all take their toll on the Arctic ecology. “Ecosystems operate at the interface of physics, chemistry, and biology, with both complementary and contradictory interactions,� Ambrose writes in a forthcoming article predicting that “regional, and perhaps global, biodiversity will suffer.�

Until recently, Ambrose researched other organisms of the benthic community, such as bloodworms along Maine’s coast. A simple matter of funding helped bring bivalves into focus, as a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ grant (from the Philip J. Otis Endowment) and an external one (from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute) helped purchase a pricey Isomet low-speed saw for preparing shell cross-sections. “Very expensive,â€� Ambrose says.

In researching the biological response of Arctic bivalves to climate change, Ambrose has depended on the interests and expertise of colleagues and students at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and abroad.

Geology professor Beverly Johnson, for example, has been invaluable in co-advising biology students so they can learn to use the College’s stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer, a tool to help identify the age and origins of molecules in various materials. Johnson herself has used the instrument to look at amino acids in dinosaur eggs, and it can likewise be used to tease out the chemical components of clamshells.

“I work with Will to understand how modern systems work,� says Johnson, “and then go back to old shells, using the geochemistry of shells from 125,000 years ago to reconstruct the environment.�

Ambrose also depends on Matt Duvall, who directs ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ new Imaging Center, to create elegant microscopic images of his clamshell sections that Ambrose calls “just incredible.â€�

Geology professor Mike Retelle, another Svalbard regular who specializes in reconstructing climates from lake sediments, has collaborated with Ambrose on researching climate-change information from fossilized Ice Age clams.

Beyond the sciences, Ambrose, Johnson, and Retelle belong to an informal North Atlantic Study Group on campus that also includes archeologists Gerald Bigelow and Bruce Bourque, historian Michael Jones, and political scientist Ã�slaug Ã�sgeirsdóttir. What started informal — an interdisciplinary coffee klatsch — has given rise to “North Atlantic Studies,â€� a thematic grouping of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ courses, known as a concentration, under the College’s new general education requirements. “We represent an area of study, rather than just a bunch of us sitting around having coffee,â€� Ambrose says.

“It’s a truly special group,� Retelle adds. “The richness of discussion is such that the boundaries between disciplines disappear. The walls of the box dissolve. Will is a big part of that. As a model for an undergraduate institution, Will has really raised the bar.�

Ambrose himself is quick to point out that “students here are the ones driving the bus in terms of getting the work done.� As he speaks, Greg Henkes ’08 of Chapel Hill, N.C., is downstairs in the environmental geochemistry lab cutting shells and extracting organic material. Henkes’ senior thesis involves a study of 130 years of climate change in the Barents Sea and Svalbard using a historic Russian collection of Serripes groenlandicus. He will present his findings to an American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.

Greg Henkes ’08, one of Will Ambrose’s thesis students, took this photograph at 3 a.m. on June 3, 2007, as the research shipLance heads through sea ice in Storfjord in the Svalbard archipelago, about halfway between the North Pole and Norway.

“It’s pretty incredible to be able to do this at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,â€� says Henkes. “It’s the way science is going,â€� says Ambrose of the collaborative nature of scientific enquiry, noting his international partnerships with colleagues at the Norwegian Polar Institute and the research firm Akvaplan-niva. “People aren’t doing their own little thing anymore.â€�

“That’s the way science should be done,â€� emphasizes Kelton McMahon, co-author of the Serripes groenlandicus paper. “In certain circles, it is. But a lot of people come from departments that don’t share data because they feel funding is in direct competition. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ takes a very progressive approach to interdisciplinary research.â€�

McMahon is now working on his Ph.D. in a program co-sponsored by MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His contribution to the clamshell research has been to use two gizmos — a New Wave Research UP213 laser ablation system coupled to a Thermo Finnigan Element 2 single collector field inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer — to measure the chemical components of shell samples. Ambrose et al. used changes in the ratio of strontium to calcium to establish that the external lines of the Greenland cockleshells were, in fact, annual growth lines. “If it wasn’t for Kelton getting us access to those machines,� says Ambrose, “the paper wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good.�

As he sits in his Carnegie office discussing his work — Ambrose also hopes to extend his sclerochronology research to coral in part because “they live much longer than clams� — he is eagerly awaiting a new shipment of Svalbard shells that he hopes will solve a quirk in his findings. Until recent years, Ambrose found that annual clam growth was high in years when the extent of Arctic ice pack, as measured each March, was low. But over the last several years, “growth didn’t track ice cover the way it did before. Something happened, but we’re not sure what,� he says. “Are the last four years unnatural? That’s why I want those new clams. It’s another four years of data that will help establish some baselines.� And baselines will help provide more answers, which will probably just beget more questions. It’s the wayscientific inquiry works. “People like simple answers,� Ambrose says. “Nature doesn’t.�

By Edgar Allen Beem

Freelance writer Edgar Allen Beem wrote about the in the Fall 2007 issue of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Magazine.