The day after the storm, Jenny Matthew didn’t go out to the beach looking for things.
Overnight, the remnants of Typhoon Halong had torn through the coast.
“The house kept shaking,” Matthew remembered.
The next day, she and her husband rode four-wheelers along the Bering Sea beach a mile from their home. She could see how the wind and water had torn up the tundra on the coast. Then, she noticed something else.
“I said to my husband, 'Look, what's that?,'" Matthew said. “We stopped. He got up and took it, and it was that bowl.”
The bowl was wooden and smooth. It was carved by Quinhagak residents half a century ago.
The storm had unearthed it from the archaeological dig site, called Nunalleq, that sits near the village. That bowl was one of thousands of artifacts the storm scattered across miles of coastline.
Matthew, her daughter, her husband, and several other Quinhagak community residents began to recover as many of the exposed artifacts as possible.
“Couple of days later, the ground kind of froze and snowed, and we couldn't find anything,” Matthew said.
Now, summer has come to the Nunalleq dig site, thawing the earth again for excavation. The site is renowned as one of the best examples of Yup’ik culture and life before Russian contact.
A team of archaeologists spread out across a dug crater in the dirt, the Bering Sea swell just yards away. They were part of an emergency dig to recover as much of the history as possible before the next big storm.
Archaeologist Charlotta Hillerdal has been coming to this dig site for years. She said that it's like an old friend. She was home in Scotland when she heard that Nunalleq had been submerged under several feet of water during the storm.
“I was crying,” Hillerdal said. “It was a horrible feeling.”
To save time during this summer’s three-week dig, the dirt wasn't searched twice, so Hillerdal had to be extra attentive. From her corner of the dig, her trowel touched something solid. She brushed away the dirt to reveal the stern face of a wooden doll.
“So we have find quite a lot of these, but this one is nice because it looks like it has a painted face, which is quite unusual,” Hillerdal said.
Rick Knecht is the dig’s lead archaeologist. He said that the families who lived in the house uncovered by the dig were dealing with rapid climate change too. Five-hundred years ago, when Shakespeare was writing plays in England, Western Alaska experienced a period of cooling called the Little Ice Age. Quinhagak’s ancestors survived by adapting their hunting. And they made intricate carvings inside their homes, sheltered from the weather.
Today, Quinhagak residents have watched the Bering Sea creep closer and closer.
Knecht said that since the dig started nearly 20 years ago, they’ve barely kept ahead of the coastal erosion. As the climate warms, they’re losing something like 3 feet of coast a year.
“It's like every bit as tough as working in front of bulldozers,” Knecht said.
The archaeologists have always known that the sea would eventually overtake Nunalleq, but Knecht said that no one thought it would come this soon or this violently. Now, they’re in a sprint to recover everything they can.
“I'll be damned if I'm going to leave this for the waves,” Knecht said. “You see the kind of things we're finding. It's too much. It's, you just can't. It's like, you might as well take those pieces of artwork we're finding and skip it off into the Bering Sea; not doing it.”
Knecht said that every find is a miracle. In the days after ex-typhoon Halong, there were about 2,000 of them along Quinhagak’s beach.
The artifacts that the community recovered from the shore have helped solve mysteries of life in Quinhagak’s past. Knecht held up a wooden mask with etched lines. Among them is a half circle, what the Nunalleq researchers understand to be a shorthand for the eye of awareness, a Yup’ik symbol denoting the universe.
“Thanks to that mask and thanks to this, we can make that jump and realize that they're putting a little eye of awareness, that little recognition of the universe on the bottom of every bowl. Never could figure out what that was,” Knecht said.
Knecht said that without that find in the muck following the storm, the fragmented symbols would remain a mystery. He said that the recoveries are one example of the mutual aid going on in Quinhagak. Nalaquq, a subsidiary of the village’s tribal corporation, facilitates the Nunalleq project. Through the dig and other projects, they’ve been working to bridge local knowledge with modern technology. They provided drone training for Quinhagak’s search and rescue team, who were the community’s first responders in the hours after ex-typhoon Halong.
“That's how you get through a climate crisis and change,” Knecht said. “You get together, you share ideas, you share technologies, and it's exactly what happened here at the site 400 years ago.”
Lynn Church, the CEO of Nalaquq, says for Yup’ik communities facing climate change, their culture is on the line. It’s the same culture that connects them to their ancestors, whose hunting tools, carved artwork, and sewing needles have been excavated from the Nunalleq site.
“The bigger picture is that we want our people to live our way of life, the subsistence lifestyle, continue to live it and be safe at home at the same time,” Church said.
After ex-typhoon Halong, Church said that some families who experienced flooding in their homes evacuated to Anchorage. Village infrastructure, like pipes and wooden bridges, was displaced by the water.
“These storms are gonna keep happening whether we like it or not,” Church said. “ But what I like about the Yup’ik culture is that, despite the hardships and environmental changes we see throughout the years, and the technology advancing, we tend to adapt, and so we're adapting, so we're preparing.”
Church said that after Halong, the community created new emergency procedures and response plans. They’ll use drones to assess damages. It’s all in the effort, like that of their ancestors, to continue to adapt to a changing climate and thrive.
