Collaborative Research: The Hot Springs Village Site: a Window to Southern Bering Sea Paleo-Ecosystems and Human - Landscape Interactions

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

The southern Bering Sea and Bristol Bay are home to the United States? most important fisheries. Understanding the southern Bering Sea ecosystem is so critical to our understanding of climate change, global economic development, and modern fisheries that a number of US agencies have invested considerable resources to understand the Bering Sea ecosystem. Yet little is known about the ancient history of the Bering Sea, with no baseline from which to measure any modern changes. This collaborative project will undertake excavations at precisely identified locations in temporally distinct middens at the Hot Springs site, Port Moller, Alaskan Peninsula. Hot Springs has been excavated repeatedly in the past but poorly documented. It is one of the largest, if not the largest, village site on the Bering Sea coast, the northernmost known Aleut village, and a potential place for Aleut/Alutiiq interaction or occupation. On these grounds, alone, it is worth re-investigating to understand better regional prehistory. However, the PIs will also investigate major archaeological and ecological questions in the Bering Sea region, including human use of landscapes, stability and change in subsistence practices, species distribution, long-term climate change, and sea ice regimes. The project will add much to our understanding of human ecodynamic systems in the southeastern Bering Sea region, as well as including education and training for local Aleut students. What makes this project most important is that the site was occupied during some of the warmest climatic regimes of the last 5000 years, often during time periods when the rest of the Alaska Peninsula shows a sparse population. It is at the southern edge of the winter ice pack but has deep and stratified shellfish deposits from 4000 years of human harvesting. Over 100 taxa of mammals, birds, fish, and shellfish have been identified in the Hot Springs deposits. Using systematic and targeted excavations to collect large samples of faunal remains from the Hot Springs Village site, the PIs will reconstruct the environmental history of the southern Bering Sea with the potential to create a baseline for modern fisheries studies.