Studying Past Iñupiat Legacy Collections from the Kobuk River, Northwestern Alaska: Challenges and Benefits of Developing an Integrated Database

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Current Research and Challenges in Arctic and Subarctic Cultural Heritage Studies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Iñupiat collections from archaeological sites located along the Kobuk River, excavated by J.L. Giddings, D. Anderson, and C. Hickey in the 1940s and 1960s, are held at the University of Alaska Museum of the North and the Brown University Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Their joint study requires detailed cataloging of artifacts and all associated contextual information (site and feature descriptions, maps or photographs, field notes, and other existing archival documentation), thus generating vast amounts of heterogeneous yet interconnected data. With basic technical and programming knowledge and limited means, we use free, open-source, and institutionally supported software to build a database able to support large datasets of various natures and allow complex queries. One of our goals is to standardize the terminology used to designate and describe past Iñupiat archaeological artifacts, revisit conventional functional classifications, and reconsider assemblage variability within and between sites. Combined with a dating program and settlement patterns analysis, our research aims to ultimately provide a better understanding of the last 600 years of precolonial occupation in and around the Kobuk River region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Current Research and Challenges in Arctic and Subarctic Cultural Heritage Studies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39142.0