Nalaquq / “It is found”: Collaborative Heritage Landscape Survey and Spatial Technology with Alaska Native Communities

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the face of a rapidly changing climate, Alaska Native Yup'ik (pl. Yupiit) communities on the Bering Sea are increasingly empowered and motivated to protect their landscape heritage—facilitated in part by collaborative projects with outside institutions like the Quinhagak Archaeological Project (2009–present). In this paper we show how high density survey and measurement (HDSM) technologies, when used in conjunction with Yup’ik partners and their traditional wisdom, can be effectively deployed to manage and monitor at-risk cultural landscapes. HDSM techniques and ethnographic approaches generate dearth of spatial data that can be used to manage threats to infrastructure, heritage, and subsistence activity areas. Many years of collaborating in this manner has culminated in the formation of Nalaquq LLC, an Alaska Native community-owned CRM firm based in Quinhagak, which seeks to carry out landscape heritage research in the region and foster a new generation of Yupiit trained in geospatial techniques.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Collaborative and Community Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38945.0