Excavations at Zaimka Mound

Zaimka's Story

Zaimka Mound lies in a grassy meadow on Cliff Point, a long peninsula that stretches into Chiniak Bay, south of the City of Kodiak. The site is a 30 minute drive from town, down a bumpy gravel road off the Chiniak Highway. It faces Womens Bay and the Nyman peninsula, opposite the Kodiak Airport.

A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin identified Zaimka Mound in 1964. They tested the site and reported their findings to the State Office of History and Archaeology.

The site gained the attention of Alutiiq Museum archaeologists in 1996, when off road vehicles began to wear deep trails across the mound. Their tires cut through the thick vegetation, the modern soil, and a 25cm layer of volcanic ash deposited in 1912, to expose a layer of cultural material rich with the charcoal of ancient campfires.
 

Archaeologists recognized the artifacts as indicative of the Early Kachemak era (2,800 to 4,000 years old) - a little known period of Kodiak prehistory. Although researchers have been studying Kodiak prehistory for more than 70 years, sites from the Early Kachemak have remained rare. Some hypothesized that the region was little settled in this era, that residents left the archipelago due to a natural disaster or perhaps invasion from the mainland. Others wondered whether sites of this era were simply harder to find due to changes in the archipelago's shoreline or the way people used the landscape. Archaeologists believed that the answer might lie buried in Zaimka Mound.

With permission from Leisnoi, Inc. - the landowner, and the Woody Island Tribal Council - the Alutiiq community whose heritage the site reflects, the museum organized four years of excavation.
 

---

 

Naming the Mound

In Alaska, sites are named by the researchers who find and study them. Leslie Watson - a Kodiak College student who participated in surveying and reporting on the settlement in 1997 - named the site. She called it after the small offshore island that provides the area protection from wind and waves. Scholars differ on the meaning of word Zaimka. It comes from Russian, and may mean "meadow" or "temporary settlement". Both definitions are fitting as the setting for this repeatedly visited camp is a lush, rolling field.

In addition to a name, every site in Alaska receives a number that is part of a National documentation system. Zaimka's number is 49-KOD-013. This number encodes information about the site's location. The number 49 stands for Alaska - the 49th state, and KOD is an abbreviation for Kodiak - the name of the US Geological Survey topographic map on which the site falls. The number thirteen tells us that Zaimka is the 13th archaeological site identified in the area covered by the USGS Kodiak map.
 

---

From the Surface

At Zaimka, cultural deposits form a mound of debris about 45 meters wide and 80 meters long, covering a 3,600 square meter area. The mound rises about 5 meters above the meadow floor and has a commanding view of Womens Bay. Look to the north and you will see the City of Kodiak, sheltered behind a cluster of islands at the northern entrance to Chiniak Bay. To the west lies the salmon rich Buskin River, and to the south, the quiet inner waters of Womens Bay.

 

Zaimka's Meadow

The geography of the meadow reveals some the area's history. Berms of beach gravel buried beneath the lush vegetation record the location of past shorelines and illustrate that the settlement was once much closer to the water.

Human use of the meadow did not end with the abandonment of Zaimka Mound. Another mound of prehistoric debris, KOD-014, lies below Zaimka, closer to the modern shoreline. Large, multi-roomed house depressions and well preserved garbage suggest this settlement is less than 500 years old, dating to the Koniag era.

The meadow also holds traces of recent history. A network of dirt roads dissects the area. Some of these are remnants from the World War II build up of Kodiak. Others are tracks made over the past decade by off road vehicles, a symptom of Kodiak's growing modern population.
 

---

 

Excavation Layout

Blanketed by tall grasses and fireweed, the only clues to Zaimka's treasures are faint depressions on the site's surface. These depressions hinted at the presence of underlying structures - houses and pits - and helped museum archaeologists lay out the excavation. Although investigations focused on the western edge of the site - closest to the water, excavation in two other areas helped archaeologists study the different activities that took place across the site.

To date, researchers have opened 130 one meter square excavation units, removing over 200 cubic meters of site deposit. Most of this work has been done by hand, and most of the dirt has been passed through half inch or quarter inch mesh screens to improve the recovery of artifacts.







 

---

 

Layers

Zaimka Mound has many layers of cultural debris. Sandwiched between the rubble left by retreating glaciers more than 16,000 years ago, and a thick deposit of ash from a 1912 volcanic explosion on the Alaska Peninsula, are a series of distinct soils indicating that people visited Cliff Point repeatedly for nearly 4,000 years.

The site contains a variety of cultural materials. Stone tools occur throughout the deposit in and around man-made features. The site holds the remains of houses, stone tent rings, hearths, storage pits and processing features. Unfortunately, however, there is very little organic material preserved at Zaimka. Remains of the plants and animals that site residents harvested for raw material, food and shelter have decayed over the millennia. Only burned organics - wood charcoal and small fragments of burned bone - remain.

These materials rest in different types of soil. The top layers of the site are in organic soil - dirt created by the decay of plant material. These layers have a dark brown, grey or even black appearance. In contrast, the lower, older levels of the site are made of volcanic ashes - sediment created by the explosion of volcanoes on the Alaska Peninsula and carried to Kodiak by the wind. These layers range from yellow to dark orange.

Together the different kinds cultural materials and the different types of soil form discrete, identifiable layers. Investigators grouped these layers into components, each reflecting a different use of the site. There are at least five components at Zaimka Mound. Each tells a different story, illustrating changes in housing styles, technologies, and subsistence activities over a 4,000 year span of Alutiiq history. Here are some of the stories.
 

---

 

 

First Residents: 7300 Years Ago

The lowest layers of the mound contain traces of some of Kodiak's earliest settlers. Just centimeters above glacial deposits, archaeologists uncovered chipped stone tools around the remains of a small fire. A cluster of post holes and a layer of red ochre - an iron oxide that may have been used to tan hides - suggests that a fire may have burned next to a simple structure. A stone lamp carved from sandstone illustrates that Zaimka's occupants also burned seal oil for light.




 

Microbaldes
The stone tools in these layers include tiny chipped stone blades - known as microblades. These microblades were struck from wedge-shaped cores of red chert and used to line the edges of bone hunting lances. These tools are similar to those found on the Alaska Peninsula and in the Aleutian Islands, suggesting the Kodiak's first colonists arrived from the west.



 

 

---

Hunters: 6300-5000 Years Ago
The middle layers of Zaimka Mound contain evidence of hunting from temporary camps. Simple hearths, surrounded by rings of stacked stone or clusters of postholes represent the remains of tents. They are surrounded by chipped stone points used to pursue sea mammals and cutting and scraping tools used to process the catch.

 

 

 

First Houses: 4500-5000 Years Ago

By about 5,000 years ago, some of Zaimka's visitors were spending more time at the site. Although evidence of tents is still present, Component 2 holds at least one sod house. This structure was dug into the ground and had a post and beam framework that supported a sod-covered roof. People entered the house through a narrow doorway. A small slate lined hearth, located to one side of the structure provided heat and light.

 

 

Fishermen: 4000 - 3400 Years Ago
The last residents of Zaimka Mound were fishermen. New types of artifacts appear in this era, most notably two types of stone sinkers- plummets and notched cobbles. These tools suggest that site residents pursued cod and halibut in nearby Chiniak Bay and perhaps salmon in area streams.

To process these fish, residents used another new type of tool - the ground slate ulu knife, as well as sharp-edged flakes of stone struck from beach cobbles. Large pits filled with gravel and the site's jet black soil suggest that the catch was dried for storage with the aid of fire and / or heated rocks. Middens of this era look like the contents of a heavily used fire pit.

 Stone line sinkers.

Archaeologists believe that this emphasis on fishing and fish processing reflects an increased reliance on stored foods. A colder, stormier climate and a reduction in the availability and accessibility of sea mammals may have encouraged people to make greater use of Kodiak's rich salmon resources.

The last residents of the site continued to build and live in sod-roofed houses, which provided shelter from the wetter, cooler weather of the era.

---

DATING THE MOUND
To date the different layers of Zaimka Mound we relied on three techniques. First, and most simply, we used the site's layers as a general guide to the age of the materials it holds. As the site developed from the bottom up, we know that the more deeply buried an artifact or a feature, the older it must be. We also know that Alutiiq craftsmen changed the types and styles of the tools they used over time. For example, ulus were not widely made or used until about 4,000 years ago. Ulus occur only in the top layer of the mound, so we estimate that this layer is less than 4,000 years old. Thus, by noting the association between tools and layers, we can estimate the age of different occupations.

One way to test these relative estimates is to submit charcoal samples for radiocarbon dating. All living organisms contain carbon, which decays at a predictable rate after death. Special laboratories can measure the amount of carbon remaining in organic material to get a carbon date, an estimate of the material's age. Carbon dates are not the same as calendar dates, and they are less precise, but they provide archaeologists with a way to estimate age.
 

Radiocarbon Dates from Zaimka Mound

Locus	Provenience	Era	Lab #	RCYBP	Calibrated Calendar Age in Years BP
Main	Pit O	EK	196477	3109±60*	3550 to 3320
Main	Pit D Rock Pile	EK	172028	3340±70	3720 to 3400
Main	House Floor 1	EK	172027	3500±80*	3980 to 3580
Main	Level 1	EK	130190	3890±70	4515 to 4465, and 4450 to 4095
C	House Floor 2	OBII	183692	4540±180*	5610 to 4820, and 4750 to 4720
C	House Floor 3	OBII	193694	4370±70	5280 to 5170, 5130 to 5100, and 5080 to 4830
Main	House Floor 4	OBII	183695	4350±70	5260 to 5180, and 5060 to 4830
C	House Floor 5	OBI	183693	5360±60	6290 to 5990
Main	Level 2c Hearth	OBI	130191	5530±130*	6625 to 6000
Main	House Floor 9	OBI	196474	6040±60	7010 to 6730
Main	Level 4 - Ochre	OBI	196476	5980±100*	7150 to 7130, 7020 to 6610, and 6590 to 6570
Main	Lower Level 4	OBI	196475	6200±60*	7260 to 6920
Main	Level 4 - Hearth	OBI	130188	6250±70*	7300 to 6975
Main	Level 4 - Scatter	OBI	130189	6390±70	7435 to 7205

Table notes - All dates on on wood charcoal, run and calibrated by Beta Analytic. * = obtained through extended counting. RCYBP = radiocarbon years before the present. EK = Early Kachemak, OBII = Ocean Bay II, OBI = Ocean Bay I. Calibrated dates are presented as a two standard deviation result.

The table above illustrates the results obtained from carbon dating 10 different samples of wood charcoal from Zaimka Mound. These dates are arranged from youngest to oldest. They indicate that the site was first occupied about 7,300 years ago, by some of the earliest settlers of the archipelago. Other visits to the meadow occurred throughout the four, fifth and sixth millennia before the present, until the site was used for the last time about 3,500 years ago.

---

PLANTS AND ANIMALS
Despite the poor organic preservation at Zaimka Mound, small fragments of charcoal and burned animal bone from the site enhance the picture of prehistoric life at Cliff Point.

Most of the animal bone from the site is calcined - the bone has been burned at a temperature high enough to eliminate it organic material, which promotes its preservation.Identification of calcined bone fragments from the site by zooarchaeologists Megan Partlow and Bob Kopperl indicates that residents harvested a variety of locally available resources, including marine fish, salmon, water fowl, sea birds, porpoises, seals and at least one bear.

Identification of the plants represented in charcoal samples by paleoethnobotanist Dave Tennessen illustrates that residents primarily burned local shrubs in their fires. Willow and alder were the most common sources of fuel at the site between 5,500 and 7,500 years ago. In contrast, they burned very little driftwood. In Kodiak's treeless prehistoric environment, driftwood was probably saved to build structures and make tools.

 

---

 

Interpretation
They Zaimka Mound project is part of a larger study of the prehistory of Chiniak Bay. From Zaimka, and other sites that also hold deposits dating to the Early Kachemak eras, we have learned that the Chiniak was well populated between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago. It now appears that the Early Kachemak was not an era of sparse population, but a time when Kodiak's hunting and gathering people began to focus more intensively on harvesting and storing of fish. The heavy reliance on salmon that characterizes Alutiiq societies today, seems to have begun 4,000 years ago.

Our knowledge of the site and of the history it represents will continue to grow as archaeologists study the assemblage in succeeding years. The artifacts from Zaimka Mound are on long-term loan to the Alutiiq Museum from Leisnoi, Inc., the owner of the sit and its collection. They are stored under museum acquisition number AM411.

 

---

QUYANAASINAQ - THANK YOU VERY MUCH TO OUR SUPPORTERS

The Community Archaeology program is truly a community collaboration. Each year the museum receives support from many individuals and organizations to pay project costs, set up excavation permits, establish curation agreements to care for the artifacts recovered, arrange for student credit opportunities, manage project logistics, and develop educational resources. The Zaimka Mound project has been generously supported by the following organizations -

ALUTIIQ HERITAGE FOUNDATION
LEISNOI, INCORPORATED
WOODY ISLAND TRIBAL COUNCIL
KODIAK COLLEGE - UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA ANCHORAGE
KODIAK ISLAND BOROUGH SCHOOL DISTRICT
NATIVES OF KODIAK, INC.
PRIVATE DONORS