Old Harbor Archaeological History Project: Ing'yuq Site (KOD-114), (2019)

This project examines strategies of persistence and survivance among Sugpiaq communities in the Kodiak Archipelago during the period of Russian colonialism (1784-1867). Sugpiaq (also known as Alutiiq) people have a more than 7,500-year history on Kodiak and in the surrounding areas. Through that long history, they adapted and invented new technologies, grew from small and mobile communities to large, settled villages, fought and traded with their neighbors and created a vibrant and industrious coastal society composed of tens of thousands of people on Kodiak and adjacent parts of the outer Kenai Peninsula, Prince William Sound and the Alaska Peninsula. But Russian colonialism brought unprecedented challenges to Sugpiaq communities including systematic violence, epidemic disease, forced labor, resettlement and religious conversion. Colonial entanglements with Russian fur trading companies and clergy impacted the daily lives of Sugpiaq peoples in countless ways. In this project, we investigate how Sugpiaq people negotiated these challenges in their daily lives – persisting physically, socially, spiritually, and culturally through the shocks of initial colonialism and, ultimately, to the present day. This project is undertaken as community-based participatory research, in which we collaborated with the modern Sugpiaq community in Old Harbor to co-produce knowledge about the past and co-develop youth programs centered around the research. The data deposited here are from archaeological excavation at the Ing'yuq site (KOD-114), which is on Sitkalidak Island in the Kodiak Archipelago. Ing'yuq was occupied by Sugpiaq ancestors from the mid-17th to mid-19th centuries. Included datasets are: 1. Catalog of archaeological collections 2. Raw archaeofaunal data 3. Radiocarbon dates 4. Copies of archaeological reports (redacted to protect sensitive information)