Nuna Nalluituq / The Land Remembers: Spatial Technology and Community Engagement to Protect Alaska Native Heritage Landscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Southwest Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim (YK) Delta, where two immense salmon-bearing rivers flow into the Bering Sea, is the ancestral homeland of the Yup’ik people. This biodiverse subarctic tundra wetland is a landscape in constant flux from the annual cycle of flooding, silting, and erosion. However, the effects of unmitigated climate warming have accelerated landscape change to an unprecedented degree, threatening modern infrastructure, heritage, and traditional Yup’ik subsistence lifeways. There is therefore a need to develop new strategies to assist communities in monitoring these at-risk landscapes. Based on fieldwork conducted with the community of Quinhagak, it will be demonstrated how high-density survey and measurement, archival spatial datasets, and community engagement may be deployed to (1) identify undocumented heritage sites and (2) monitor known ones. For example, multispectral false-color composites and digital elevation models derived from unpiloted aerial vehicles are best used in tandem to locate precontact sod-built structures. An experimental points-based system that considers ethnographic accounts and traditional place-name etymology alongside topography may be used to model past subsistence use. Automated change detection and visual inspection of archival imagery are effective for identifying areas of the landscape that are most endangered from erosion.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35816.0