Karluk Lake is about as far from the coast as you can get on Kodiak Island, particularly the southern end of the lake.  Yet Alutiiq Museum archaeologists believe Alutiiq people once lived on the lake – in the wintertime!  This past May, Museum Curator Patrick Saltonstall set off to investigate with a grant from the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

Saltonstall explains.  “Although Kodiak’s interior is not a focus of modern settlement, there are lots of important resources in the interior, and many of them are available in the cold seasons when it’s difficult to hunt and fish in the ocean.  If you think about feeding your family, it makes a lot of sense to live on one of Kodiak’s lakes in the winter.”

This perspective is relatively new to Kodiak archaeologists, who have focused on coastal sites and assumed that all settlements in the interior were summer fish camps.  But recent opportunities to study the shores of Kodiak’s lakes and rivers tell a different story.  “We do find sites that look like fish camps,” said Saltonstall.  “These are small settlements with one or two, small, simply made houses, lots of ulus for cutting fish, and some processing features.  But we also find villages.  These settlements are the same age as the fish camps, but they are really big, with large, well-made houses, and structures that may be qasgiq – the buildings where people held festivals. They look like big villages on the coast.”

One such village occurs at the head of Karluk Lake, where archaeologists mapped the remains of 27 late prehistoric sod houses this spring.  “If you consider that each house sheltered several families, this settlement may have been home to over 300 people.  It wasn’t a fish camp!  It was a community the size of Old Harbor!!”

The project is also aimed at assessing the condition of archaeological sites in the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, to assist land managers with their preservation.  Next summer Saltonstall and crew will return to the lake to continue identifying sites and mapping their contents.  And one day they hope to conduct excavations in an interior village to look for more subtle clues of seasonality and test their hypotheses about past uses of Kodiak’s interior.  In the meantime they are consulting Alutiiq Elders to learn as much as they can about travel, subsistence, and settlement away from Kodiak’s coast.

“The Elders know all about the riches of the interior,” notes Saltonstall, “archaeologists just never asked them till now.”

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