Anthropologist Tobias Holzlehner interviews a man in Uelen, Russia, to understand how residents use borderlands as resources to drive socioeconomic change. All photos: Tobias Holzlehner

Cities, towns and villages located near the dividing lines of nations are a complex web of people, politics, cultures, commodities and lives. This unique combination makes the borderlands of the Russian Far East a treasure trove of information for one anthropologist.

Tobias Holzlehner, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, has a keen interest in studying how the people use borderlands as a resource to drive socioeconomic transformation in increasingly globalized economies.

One of his latest projects, Informal Networks and Space at the Margins of the Russian State, is focused on two borderland regions in eastern Russia. The National Science Foundation provides funding for this research.

“The study of borderlands is a topic that evolved maybe 15 or 20 years ago. It’s really closely connected to our attempt to understand an increasingly globalized world where the migration of people or flow of commodities is frequently associated with our borders,” Holzlehner said.

Chukotka and Primore: two different Russian borderlands

Much of Holzlehner’s research focuses on the Chukotka Autonomous Region and Pimorsky Krai, less formally known as Primore. Both regions were severely affected by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and experienced mass migrations as people left to seek work in larger Russian cities.

Chukotka is a more remote Arctic region in the far northeast corner of Russia. At a local level, many of the 50,000 people who inhabit this region are subsistence hunters and fishermen. Gold mining and oil exploration on the continental shelf also contribute to the national economy.

Primore, to the south, shares its western border with China and is home to roughly two million people. The region has a long maritime history and is still a major shipping port for eastern Russia.

Collapse of the Soviet Union gives rise to research opportunities

Holzlehner first began studying the people, economies and politics of the Russian Far East in 1996, after completing his master’s in anthropology at Germany’s University of Tübingen. His research coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Holzlehner spent three consecutive field seasons studying the people and the politics of archaeology in the 1990s. He began a doctorate program that led to hours of research in open-air markets in regions bordering China. There he observed inter-ethnic interactions and informal and unsanctioned trade in borderlands. He then did postdoctorate research in Chukotka studying the impacts of forced relocations following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“I really tried to combine my year-long exchanges in Chukotka and maritime Primore into one project,” he said. “The obvious thing was that both regions were in borderlands and so I proposed this project to the National Science Foundation doing a comparative study with a focus on how people use borderland regions through time as a resource.”

Breaking barriers

Residents working on a new cabin in Pinakul, a former village site in the Chukotka region.

Collecting data on how people earn a living, move money across borders, and other sensitive subjects requires a great deal of trust between Holzlehner and the people he interviews.

He built this trust through years living and working in these two Russian borderlands. Workers and their families know and respect Holzlehner and are often eager to tell their stories.

“When I first did my field work [in the open air markets], it took me at least a month to make contacts. Day after day, I bought carrots from one of my favorite traders. He finally asked me why I bought all these carrots and we started talking,” Holzlehner recalled with a laugh. “It takes time for people to accept and trust you, especially when you’re working in these gray areas.”

Borderlands as a resource

Sportivnaya market in Vladivostok, a large city in Primorsky Krai, Russia.

During his two- or three-month trips to Chukotka and Primore, Holzlehner interviews subjects and records observations on how people use the regions as a resource.

For example, in Primore, small-scale cross-border traders regularly travel from Russia to China and import most of the commodities for large open-air markets. The shuttle trader system provides various possibilities for the participants who show skillful use of insider knowledge and personal relationships.

In Chukotka, extraordinary resilience, as well as novel strategies of coping with loss and industrial collapse, created new forms of communities, where the re-use and re-settlement of previously abandoned village sites play a paramount role.

Tangible data

Users can delve into Holzlehner’s data via Google Earth to get a better understanding of commodity flow patters and resident migration.

Much like a journalist, Holzlehner starts an interview with a handful of questions and then lets the conversations flow naturally. He’s often surprised at how much information people are willing to share.To protect their privacy, the exact locations and identities of his interview subjects are often changed in published literature.

In addition to collecting interview data on people’s trades and livelihoods, Holzlehner snaps numerous pictures in an effort to help others visualize the flow of commodities and migrating people.

“On my web page, you can download these files and explore certain aspects of the borderlands in a very visual way,” he said. He is using Google Earth as a platform to serve geo-located images and data files to do this.

What’s next?

During his 2012 field season, the project’s inaugural year, Holzlehner spent three months in Primore collecting data. This summer, he’ll return to Chukotka from June to August.

“[With this project] I would like to bring more light in to the shadow of borderland economies because I think these areas have been really underestimated. There are complex and very well functioning mechanisms that regulate the unorthodox aspects of the economy.”

To learn more about Tobias Holzlehner and his research, visit: https://sites.google.com/a/alaska.edu/far-eastern-borderlands/. –Alicia Clarke

Comments (0) May 22 2013

Gordon Hamilton and his colleagues focused their efforts to locate a downed WWII plane in southeast Greenland. The landscape of Koge Bugt, Greenland, the study area, is pictured here. Photo: Gordon Hamilton

The vast ice sheet of Greenland has long served as a teacher, time capsule, and research station for everything from early cultures to climate change to World War II history.

Yep, you read that right. World War II. As surprising as it may sound, there are a number of lost U.S. World War II planes encased in Greenland’s ice sheet.

University of Maine professor of glaciology Gordon Hamilton normally travels to Greenland to study the glaciers, their outflow patterns, how they interact with climate and how they may impact sea-level change in the future. But over the past several years, he’s joined a unique partnership to locate the wreckage of a plane and repatriate the remains of its lost service men.

This month Hamilton talks to Field Notes about how he’s bringing his knowledge of glaciers and their flow patterns to support efforts by the U.S. government to uncover plane wreckage in southeast Greenland.

Field Notes (FN): Where did the idea to search for lost World War II planes in Greenland come from?

Gordon Hamilton (GH): I became involved in 2008. I got a call from one of the various offices in Washington D.C. that go back through old records and try to repatriate as many of the remains as they can find. I guess most are in Southeast Asia, but one in particular, which was a U.S. Coast Guard aircraft, bubbled up to the top of the list.

FN: What types of plane were you looking for?

GH: It’s called a Grumman J2F4 Duck and it was an amphibious type of aircraft that would be able to land on water or regular runways. This particular aircraft crashed toward the end of the war [in 1942]. It was actually a rescue aircraft. Another aircraft had crash-landed on the ice sheet and everybody survived. So they sent in this Duck aircraft to pick the survivors up. In doing so, it probably became the first aircraft to successfully land and take-off from the ice sheet. It had picked up most of the survivors and had gone back for one more group. And as it was picking up that last group it crash-landed and everybody on board was killed.

A scientist conducts a radar survey from a helicopter in search of the downed Grumman J2F4 Duck buried in ice. Photo: Gordon Hamilton

FN: Why were U.S. pilots flying aircraft over Greenland during the war?

GH: There’s a lot of aircraft in Greenland. These aircraft didn’t have very long-range capabilities. They were manufactured in the Unites States and were flown across the U.S. to Labrador (Canada) where they would refuel. They would hop across the Labrador Sea to west Greenland and refuel there. Then they would fly across the ice sheet and, weather permitting, they would try and land in Iceland or Scotland and then fly down to wherever the battles were being fought on continental Europe.

The long journey involved lots of stops for fuel, but always the most challenging part was crossing the ice cap. You have to gain a lot of elevation—you have to go up to about 12,000 feet to clear the ice cap—and it’s very cold. You also have this flat, white feature on the surface, which to a lot of pilots looks like clouds—you can’t easily tell the horizon. So a lot of planes simply flew into the ice sheet without realizing it, and there are a lot of instances when the weather was bad.

FN: What parts of Greenland are included in the study area?

GH: It’s in southeast Greenland in a place called Koge Bugt.

FN: How did you search for the Duck and what types of technology were used?

GH: Well it started off super low tech. When the Coast Guard first got in touch with me they wanted to know basic things, like how much snow falls in that part of Greenland, would it bury the aircraft, and if I was given an approximate location of where the wreckage was last seen in the late 1940s, could I predict where it would be now based on my understanding of ice flow and so on. A lot of the early work was just done through interpretation of maps and satellite images.

The same group that contacted me also contacted the NASA IceBridge airborne survey team. They asked what part of Greenland they were flying over and if they would deviate slightly from their course and run their radars over the potential wreckage location. They did that a few times but nothing really showed up in the radar record to say, OK this is a big chunk of buried metal wreckage.

So there were a lot of these ad hoc investigations for a few years. But nothing really conclusively said, OK here’s the wreckage. This sort of thing went on for a while and then we said the one way to figure it out would be to go there and measure the flow speed and carry out a dense grid of radar survey lines. Then it would be very straightforward to say if the wreckage was here, after 60 years it would most likely be at this given location. We went up there for the survey last August.

FN: Was the Duck wreckage successfully located?

GH: We did find this one! We turned over the location to the U.S. Coast Guard. My understanding is that they are going to go back this summer and start excavating the wreckage and hopefully repatriate the remains.

FN: What other organizations took part in this effort?

The helicopter and hanging radar antenna cast a shadow on the icy study area below. Photo: Gordon Hamilton

GH: For the ground survey I managed to get some of my colleagues at the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory involved. These people have done a lot of radar work in Antarctica, so I knew they had the expertise to pick out a buried, sub-surface target. [The project also included the Coast Guard and NASA IceBridge Project.]

Although this repatriation effort does not have a web site, you can learn more about World War II aircraft by visiting the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force’s World War II Gallery. For more information about Gordon Hamilton and his research, visit his University of Maine web page. –Alicia Clarke

Comments (0) May 09 2013

Professor of Education Jerry Lipka visits with village elders in a University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) conference room. Photo: Todd Paris

From the complex to the simple, so many of the daily, tradition-based activities of the Yup’ik are accomplished through the use and knowledge of symmetry.

This unusual connection is the focus of a National Science Foundation-supported project to study traditional everyday activities—from fashioning clothing out of raw irregular material to navigating on land and sea—and their potential contributions to math classes in Alaska and elsewhere.

The project is called The Potential Contribution of Indigenous Knowledge to Teaching and Learning Mathematics. It stems from Math in a Cultural Context (MCC), a larger and decades-old related body of work. Jerry Lipka, an education professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, heads both.

This concept fascinates Lipka. He points out that Yup’ik elders were the first to discover that the principles of symmetry could be used in measuring and constructing a wide variety of everyday artifacts.

“We believe that there are underlying core embedded mathematical processes that enable Yup’ik elders to precisely construct their artifacts. These ways of thinking and constructing will be transformed into teaching and learning tools that Native students can relate to at many levels,” Lipka said.

Math in a Cultural Context

MCC has a long history of developing math modules that cover specific topics by relating mathematics content with Yupik cultural content (i.e., designing parka patterns) through curriculum guides, posters, storybooks and other instructional aids.

A recent randomized control study conducted in Alaska reported that students using two second grade MCC’s modules outperformed their peers who used their “regular” school math curriculum at statistically significant levels (see Kisker, Lipka et al. 2012 in the Journal of Research in Mathematics in Education).

Other research conducted by Lipka and his colleagues also revealed similar findings.

The Potential Contribution of Indigenous Knowledge to Teaching and Learning Mathematics is now  in its first year.  Over the three-year study period, Lipka and team hope it will present additional opportunities to understand everyday Yup’ik activities and how they relate to the foundations of mathematical thinking.

Traditions Rooted in Mathematics

To tap the wealth of indigenous knowledge, Lipka is once again teaming with two of his former students turned fellow educators and colleagues, Dora Andrew-Ihrke and Evelyn Yanez.

Andrew-Ihrke and Yanez are both Yup’ik community members and retired teachers with more than 70 years of teaching experience between them. Both women are involved in MCC and other projects, so the collaboration for this latest effort was a natural fit.

“They [Andrew-Ihrke and Yanez] have a marvelous knowledge of their culture; a really deep knowledge of cultural activities and how to produce all kinds of things,” Lipka said. “And as we’ve been working together, slowly over the years, we noticed a pattern within the knowledge and began to see the mathematical nature of the knowledge.”

What is Traditional Knowledge?

“Tradition knowledge encompasses very useful information that can be passed on to the young people,” Andre-Ihrke explained. “Some of it might include how to make materials for living—for example, a coat. The process of making that coat includes mathematics and a precise way of measuring. We must not ever waste materials and the byproduct has to fit the person you are making it for. You use your body parts [i.e., a finger] as a unit of measurement. … You can’t just estimate.”

For Yanez the same is true about indigenous knowledge. “Indigenous knowledge, to me, is what I have learned outside of the Western classroom; what I learned from my parents and from the elders that I lived with,” she said. Yanez has talked extensively about how she learned to navigate without instrumentation. This knowledge relates well to the concept of a coordinate grid.

Addressing a Disconnect

Although traditional knowledge is passed down through stories and activities in the home and surrounding community, it is often not represented within schools. In fact, this disconnect is what started the group’s journey.

“I always believed that schools should reflect the community,” Lipka said. “I moved to Alaska and saw the schools and said, ‘Hmmm. What is being reflected here?’ And that got us launched on this crazy ride!”

Lipka, Andrew-Ihrke and Yanez are working with their partners across Arctic Alaska, Norway and Sweden, Greenland and Kamchatka, as well as Micronesia  to determine if indigenous groups in a different geographical, cultural, and linguistic spaces share  similarities in the ways they construct their everyday artifacts.

Teaming with Yup’ik Elders

The project team will work within the participating communities to capture video data of elders performing daily activities like preparing food and making headbands. The researchers will also collect audio data of the elders explaining their actions in their own language to help them understand how concepts are expressed.

“I may use the word symmetry when elders fold material in half to see if one side is equal to the other side, but the Yup’ik people won’t use the word symmetry. So, what word will they use and what does it mean to them?” Lipka said. Together the video and audio data let the team analyze and compare concepts and ways of thinking across all five groups. From there, they will begin to transform and apply elders’ knowledge to classroom math-oriented activities.

Next Steps

Even though the project is in its early stages, Lipka and his team are not wasting any time. Lipka, Andrew-Ihrke and Yanez have already begun to build some of the activities that can be used in the classroom.

“These include things like geometrical construction, the development of measuring tools, using techniques based on indigenous knowledge versus store-bought, already constructed rulers,” Lipka said.

Ultimately, studying and bringing indigenous knowledge into the classroom ensures it will live on in future generations. After seeing some of the teams’ earlier learning activities developed for the classroom one Yup’ik elder told Andrew-Ihrke that, “If you use this knowledge in the classroom, then the knowledge goes well into the future.” “She was very poetic,” Andrew-Ihrke recalled.

For more information about this project and Lipka’s other research on teaching math in a cultural context, visit: http://www.uaf.edu/mcc/. –Alicia Clarke

Comments (0) Apr 01 2013

A map of the Gateway to the Americas study area in southeast Alaska. Map: Timothy Heaton

James Dixon—anthropologist, Gateway to the Americas principal investigator and director of the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology—and Kelly Monteleone—a doctoral student researcher with Dixon—are using novel methods to test the theory that people entered the new world via a coastal migration route along the continental shelf of southeastern Alaska. This is a difficult scientific endeavor, because this area is now under roughly 160 meters of water as a result of changes in sea level.

James Dixon, principal investigator, aboard the Crain, a fishing vessel used for research. Credit: Gateway to the Americas II

“The primary objective of this research is to develop and refine methods for identifying and sampling ancient underwater archeological sites on the continental shelf,” Dixon explained. “We are specifically searching for sites, such as small settlements, that were occupied by people prior to the dramatic rise in sea level that occurred at the end of the last Ice Age, between about 16,000 and 10,000 years ago.”

Dixon and Monteleone are using a combination of underwater acoustic imaging data, landscape modeling and a remotely operated vehicle to search for the remnants of these immigrants with the hope of understanding what life was like for these travelers.

A New Model

Now in its second year, the first phase of the project began in 2010 and tested methods and modeling techniques that are not routinely used by marine archaeologists in North America.

“We developed a predictive model that we tested using geophysical techniques, such as side scan sonar and Van Veen grab sampling.  Our initial results are very promising, and indicate that these methods are a suitable test for the presence of archaeological sites at depths of at least 50 meters.” Monteleone explained. “We also have an ROV—a remotely operated vehicle—with cameras and lights that dives down to the sea floor. With the ROV, we were able to visually inspect areas where the sonar suggested there might be archaeological features.”

Using geophysical data, as well as ethnographic and archaeological information, Monteleone’s model is able to reconstruct what the landscape may have looked like before the area was flooded 10,000 years ago.

Phase two received NSF funding in 2011 and the first season of fieldwork kicked off in May 2012. Efforts focused on Shakan Bay and the Gulf of Esquibel; both areas are close to known terrestrial archaeological sites.

The team conducts multibeam surveys from the Antonie, a fishing vessel. Credit: Gateway to the Americas II

Navigating the 40-80-meter waters by boat, the researchers use acoustic imaging technology (sidescan sonar and multibeam echosounders) to draw detailed images of the sea floor that would include any potential maritime archeological features. This, together with Monteleone’s landscape model and the sediment data, let the team pinpoint areas of interest that can later be explored with the ROV.

“These methods provide an efficient and relatively safe method to survey large areas of the ocean floor,” Dixon said.

Sunken Secrets

So far what they’ve found using these techniques is eye opening. Initial analysis of the sediments uncovered pieces of wood, pinecones, a thick layer of broken shell called shell hash, and a curious fragment of wood currently undergoing radio carbon dating. The team also discovered what was first thought to be a fishing weir, but further analysis proved otherwise.

Sealaska Intern, Forest Haven (left) and University of New Mexico graduate student, Kelly Monteleone (right) screening bottom sediment samples. Credit: Gateway to the Americas II

According to Dixon, “What appeared to be an alignment of stones that was tentatively interpreted in 2010 as the possible remains of a stone fish weir, were reinvestigated in 2012.  Based on the results of this more comprehensive survey, it appears that this distribution of stones on the ocean floor is probably not cultural in origin.  However, the discovery of an undated fragment of cut wood and unusually high frequencies of shellfish remains suggest that this locale may warrant further investigation.”

In 2010 the team also stumbled upon something that’s not nearly so old. While surveying, they located a shipwreck that sank in 1910. The wreck was found just off a peninsula near the study area.

There are no plans to preserve or excavate the shipwreck artifacts. “With underwater archeology in general, the main action plan is to leave sites in situ, as they are currently. We’ll be doing sampling first to identify the site and second for dating purposes,” she said. “We’re not excavating. We just want to identify the locations.”

Partnerships

Another unique characteristic of the Gateway to the Americas project is the sheer size of the study area. Dixon and his team are modeling the landscape of more than 45,000 km² in all. That’s an area slightly larger than the state of Ohio!

There are many partners with a range of expertise contributing to the project’s success. They include ROV technicians who operate the vehicle and troubleshoot any quirks while in the field and under less than ideal conditions; multibeam echosounder and sidescan sonar specialists from Kongsberg; and research support provided by Sealaska Heritage Institute student interns. Sealaska is a nonprofit Alaskan Native institution. Over the next several years, Dixon and his team will continue to survey the sea floor to locate evidence that tests their coastal migration hypothesis.

“In cooperation with the Sealaska Heritage Institute (the regional Native American organization), we plan to extend our surveys in 2013 to other promising areas of the continental shelf of Southeast Alaska,” Dixon said.  “One area that is particularly exciting is near a source of obsidian (volcanic glass) that we know was used by people at least 10,000 years ago.  There may be evidence indicating even earlier use of that obsidian source preserved in the nearby ocean sediments.” –Alicia Clarke

Comments (0) Dec 13 2012

The Iita archeological site. Professor John Darwent and his team excavated from the area on the far left-hand side of the photo, on the alluvial fan at the bottom of the steep kame. All photos: John Darwent

Unearthing Greenland’s oldest artifacts

This summer a team of four scientists followed up on an exciting accidental discovery made during a 2006 expedition at Iita, a long-ago abandoned settlement in Greenland on the northern shore of the Foulke Fjord. The scientists were excavating artifacts left by the Arctic’s oldest inhabitants, the Paleoeskimos, who lived from about 4000 to 700 years ago.

The five-week, U.S. National Science Foundation-funded study was led by archaeologist John Darwent (University of California, Davis), and included his colleague Hans Lange (Greenland’s National Museum and Archives) and graduate students Hans Lennert (University of Greenland) and  Justin Junge  (Portland State University).

Rare discovery

A carved bear. Photo: Hans Lange

“Iita is a rare archaeological site, which will help us better understand how the Paleoeskimos lived and why they were replaced by the Thule culture,” explains Darwent. “The site is atypical for the high Arctic because it’s at the bottom of a kame, a geologic feature built of glacial sediment, which is eroding downslope and creating layers of soil. Each layer represents approximately a hundred years or so and there’s not much disturbance by later groups. This allows us to follow the Paleoeskimos chronologically. We were lucky we stumbled on it in 2006.”

Due to nearly year-round subzero temperatures and little vegetation, soils do not generally develop in the high Arctic. Therefore, Darwent says, they “usually find 4,000 years of stuff right out on the surface. It’s a huge jumble trying to figure out the whos and whats and wheres. It’s very difficult to sort out.”

Arctic Small Tool Tradition

A late Dorset endblade: one of the many artifacts recovered during the dig.

Archaeologists recognize Paleoeskimos as part of the Arctic Small Tool tradition meaning that (you guessed it) they made tiny tools out of chert/flint and quartz. The signature Paleoeskimo artifact – microblades, small blades that enabled them to maximize cutting edge – were customized to the Paleoeskimo lifestyle.

“These people were highly mobile so small tools were practical. The rocks they made these tools from are probably from a couple hundred kilometers away so it makes sense that they would want to get the most out of their raw materials. The yield of many blades from one rock was efficient and portable,“ Darwent says.“Think of microblades as the Bic razor of the Arctic. They would inset a handful of blades into a wood, bone, or ivory handle. When one became dull or broken, they could just replace it rather than tossing the whole thing.”

On the ground

Unit wall profile showing layers of soil; the dark layer running through the profile near the bottom is Late Dorset.

During the excavation, Darwent’s team opened up nine 1 x 1 meter plots. They removed the sod layer then used trowels to scrape off 10 cm of dirt at a time. This allowed the team to see vertical positions of artifacts and establish what may be present at the site. The team sieved excavated dirt through 1/8” sieves to recover artifacts. This allowed them to catch the tiny tools and the debitage, or tool-making waste.

“The debitage is less glamorous, but it tells us about the types of rock these people used to make tools and how they made tools. It also tells us how they used stone tools over time. As we all know, tools have a tendency to ‘walk away,’ but people are less likely to move the waste.”

Carvings and other clues

Darwent is happy about the team’s initial finds, which also included endblades (which were mounted on harpoon heads), harpoon heads, and a surprising amulet, a two-headed polar bear carved from ivory. Other findings included a pit containing burned blubber and other animal material and lots of dovekie bones. This indicates that Arctic peoples likely used Iita as a summer sea mammal hunting and processing camp, living in skin tents rather than in permanent structures.

Back in the lab, Darwent is busy.

Preservation

“First, we clean the stone artifacts and animal bones by picking off visible dirt and washing them with water and a toothbrush. The organic material, like ivory, came out of the ground wet and so we dry it very slowly. Otherwise, it will dry too fast, crack and we will lose it.  We will have a specialist clean and stabilize the nicer carvings for long term storage.”

Darwent hopes to expand the Iita excavation in 2014 or 2015 and says continued work at Iita is critical.

Looking ahead

Dr. Darwent hopes to continue the archeological dig at Iita in years to come. Pictured here is Hans Lennert, Hans Lange, and Justin Junge during the 2012 excavation.

“Right now we have these little windows, but we need to increase our efforts for a couple of reasons. First, we don’t really know what happened to the Paleoeskimos because they just vanish from the arctic archaeological record suddenly. Perhaps there was a technical or environmental reason,” Darwent says. “We need to work fast at Iita. The site is eroding quickly, especially with decreases in ice levels and more storms in late summer. There’s probably a lot of stuff eroding into the fjord and who knows what information we’ll be losing over the next 25-50 years.”—Marcy Davis

Comments (0) Dec 06 2012