Nunalleq

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The trowel edge comes up against something that is not soil and does not want to break. Peel back the black, greasy floor-muck of a sod house on the Bering Sea coast and the ground gives up what ground almost never keeps: a carved wooden mask, the paint still on it; a coil of grass basketry holding its weave; a seal-skin boot sole; a wooden doll no bigger than a hand. These things are four centuries old. They should have rotted to nothing generations ago, as organic things do everywhere the ground thaws and drains. Here they did not, because the floor they lay on stayed frozen from the year the village burned until the day a shovel found it. And the same freeze that saved them is now failing. The permafrost is warming, the tundra edge is slumping into the surf, and the Bering Sea is eating the site from the seaward side at a rate measured in feet a year. Whatever the trowel does not reach first, the water takes.

The place is called Nunalleq — “the old village,” in Yugtun, the Central Yup’ik language spoken along this coast to this day. It sits about five kilometers (three miles) south of the modern Yup’ik village of Quinhagak, Kuinerraq, and roughly 1.6 kilometers north of the mouth of the Arolik River, on the low, treeless, saturated edge of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta of southwest Alaska. And the hand on the trowel is the second half of what makes this site unlike almost any other. It is not a foreign museum’s team come to carry the finds off to a distant vault. The excavation belongs to the village. The land is owned by Quinhagak’s own people, the site was named by Quinhagak Elders, and the masks and dolls coming out of the frozen floor will be cared for by their grandchildren, in a museum a few miles up the same coast.

The old village

Nunalleq — cataloged in the state record as site GDN-248 — was a Yup’ik winter village, one of the clustered semi-subterranean sod houses in which the people of this coast passed the long dark months. Radiocarbon dates and the artifacts together place its life from about AD 1350 to 1670: pre-contact through and through, three lifetimes and more before the first sustained Russian presence reached the delta in the 1830s. The people who lived here were Yupiit — Yup’ik, “the real people,” one branch of the great Inuit-Yupik-Unangan world that rings the northern ocean from Chukotka to Greenland. They are not “Eskimo,” an outside word this coast does not use for itself; they are Yup’ik, and the Yup’ik are still here.

The years of Nunalleq’s occupation fall inside a period the coast remembers in its own oral history as the Bow and Arrow War Days — an era of endemic raiding between villages up and down the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, of surprise attacks, fortified houses, and killing. This is not a scholar’s reconstruction imposed on a silent past. It is documented Yup’ik history, carried in the memory of the living community, and the archaeology has begun to line up with it stone for stone. The likely engine of the wars was hunger. Nunalleq’s life coincides with the deepest cold of the Little Ice Age, the long chilling of the northern world running roughly from AD 1400 to 1750, which pushed the sea ice and the game and the seasons out of their reliable places and put subsistence itself under strain. When the sea and the land give less, the fights over what remains grow sharper. The war days are what that strain looked like on the ground.

The largest house complex at Nunalleq did not decay. It was destroyed, in a single violent event, sometime between about AD 1652 and 1677. Its collapsed roof came down full of arrow points. Beneath and around it the excavators recovered the remains of roughly twenty-eight people who died in the attack — most of them women, children, and older men, some of them bound with grass rope. The reading the evidence supports is grim and precise, and it matches the oral accounts closely: the village was surrounded, its people were driven or dragged out of the burning house, and they were killed. It is one of the rare cases in which a remembered massacre and an excavated one turn out to be the same event. Out of respect for the dead and for the descendant community, that part of the site is handled quietly; the human remains are not put on display, and this account keeps them at the same remove.

What the freeze kept

Set the war days aside and Nunalleq’s true singularity is a matter of chemistry as much as history. Almost everywhere that people have lived in the Arctic, the record they leave is stone, bone, ivory, and fired clay — the hard things that survive — while the overwhelming majority of what they actually made and used, the wood and grass and hide and fur and feather and gut, dissolves back into the ground within a few generations. Permafrost breaks that rule. At Nunalleq the sod-house floors froze and stayed frozen, and the organic world froze with them. The result is not a scatter of artifacts but a village caught whole: the ordinary and the sacred together, in the materials people really handled.

The count keeps rising because the ground keeps giving. At the 2018 opening of the local museum the collection stood near sixty thousand objects; by the mid-2020s more than a hundred thousand had come out of the ground, drawn from over seven hundred cubic meters of frozen deposit — by a wide margin the largest body of pre-contact Yup’ik material culture anywhere in the world. The inventory reads like a household turned out onto a table. Wooden bowls and bentwood vessels. Spoons. Grass baskets and woven mats. Ground-slate blades still hafted into the handles of knives and of the crescent-bladed woman’s knife, the uluaq. Fragments of seal-skin boots. Clay lamps. Dolls and small carved figurines. Ivory tattoo needles. A belt strung from the teeth of caribou. Tools of antler and ivory for fishing and the hunt. These are not grave goods staged for eternity; they are the used, mended, dropped, and lost things of daily life, which is exactly why they carry so much.

Among them, and central to what the village was, are the masks. Yup’ik ceremonial life turned on the carved wooden mask, and Nunalleq has produced them in numbers and in a state of preservation found nowhere else. The masks are not decoration. They belong to a cosmology in which every animal and many things besides possess a yua — a “person,” an indwelling spirit, the human-like inner self of the seal or the owl or the wind — and in which the hunt is a moral relationship with those persons rather than a simple taking of meat. Game is not seized; it gives itself, to the hunter and the community that have kept faith, honored the bones, and observed the countless small proprieties that keep the order of the world intact. In the great winter ceremonies, held in the men’s house, the qasgiq, the carved face let the yua be seen and addressed, the animal-masters thanked and courted so that the seals and the birds would return. To find a mask still bearing its paint in the floor of the house where it was danced is to touch that ceremonial life directly, not through a missionary’s hostile paraphrase but through the object itself.

The wider circumpolar frame is worth marking, and its differences with it. The Bering Sea Yup’ik are cousins to the Inuit of Arctic Canada and Greenland and share the deep structure of the hunter’s covenant with the animal powers — the sense that a broken taboo can shut the game away and starve the people. But the powers wear regional faces. The eastern Inuit tell of the sea-mother who holds the seals at the ocean floor and withholds them when the people offend; the Yup’ik of Nunalleq’s coast worked instead through the yua and the animal-masters and the great masked ceremonies and the Bladder Festival, in which the bladders of the year’s seals — holding their souls — were honored and returned to the sea to be born again. Nunalleq is the material archive of that specific tradition, and much of it is a tradition still practiced. Yugtun is spoken in Quinhagak now. Masks are still carved. The dances go on. The village that names the site is the same people, in an unbroken line, who made everything now coming out of the frozen ground.

A dig the village owns

The genealogy of the excavation is as much a part of the site’s meaning as the genealogy of the village. In the years around 2007, Quinhagak’s people were watching the sea take the coast, and watching artifacts wash loose from an eroding house site and vanish into the surf. The community decided to act before the record was gone, and — this is the decisive point — it was the community that decided. Quinhagak’s Alaska Native village corporation, Qanirtuuq Incorporated, which owns the land and speaks for its shareholders, invited the archaeologist Rick Knecht — Richard Knecht — to help, and a partnership formed with the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, where Knecht and his colleague Charlotta Hillerdal teach. Excavation began in 2009 and returned nearly every summer thereafter. The village set the goals, and there were two of them: rescue the eroding site, and reconnect Yup’ik young people to a heritage that a century of mission schooling and cultural suppression had worked to sever.

Both goals shape how the dig is run. The collection is owned and controlled not by Aberdeen or by any Lower-48 institution but by Qanirtuuq Inc. The finds were not exported for good; they were conserved and brought home. In August 2018 — the grand opening fell on Saturday, August 11 — the Nunalleq Culture and Archaeology Center opened in Quinhagak, some 450 miles (720 kilometers) west of Anchorage, a purpose-built facility to house, conserve, study, and display the collection in the village that commissioned its recovery. Warren Jones, Qanirtuuq’s chief executive, had driven the effort from the community side. What opened was, in effect, repatriation in advance: objects that under the older model would have left the region forever instead stayed within walking distance of where they were made, curated by the descendants of the people who made them. Village teenagers work the screens in the summer field season; elders sit with the finds and name what the catalogers cannot. The interpretation of the site is guided by the living community, not delivered to it.

This is why Nunalleq is cited so often as a model and not merely as a trove. It stands the standard arrangement of archaeology on its head. The usual story has a distant institution’s specialists extracting native artifacts and, in due course, unveiling them to the public in a metropolitan gallery. Here the descendant community is the owner and the commissioning party; the outside specialists work at its invitation and toward its ends; and the “unveiling” happens in the village, in Yugtun as readily as in English. It has become a flagship instance of what is called Indigenous-led, or decolonizing, archaeology — a shift from extractive salvage to genuine power-sharing, in which the Yup’ik are the subject of the work in the sense of its authors, not its objects.

A carved Yup’ik dance mask of the kind central to the ceremonial life recorded at Nunalleq — the animal-and-spirit face that let the yua be seen and addressed in the winter ceremonies. Daderot, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The race against the sea

Everything at Nunalleq happens against a clock, and the clock is the climate. The permafrost that preserved the village is the same permafrost whose thaw is destroying it, and the paradox is exact rather than poetic. As the ground warms it loses the ice that held it together; as the ice goes the coast slumps; and the Bering Sea, its own storm season lengthening as the protective shore ice forms later and thinner, drives straight into the exposed bank. By 2013 an estimated three-quarters of the original site had already been lost to the sea. The excavation has been, in the plainest terms, a rescue operation — a race to lift the record ahead of the water, knowing the water is faster.

The storms make the loss visible and sudden. In September 2022 the remnants of Typhoon Merbok, the most powerful storm to strike the region in half a century, drove a surge along thirteen hundred miles of western Alaska coast and, at Nunalleq, tore into the site and scattered artifacts along the beach. Three years later, in mid-October 2025, the remnants of ex-Typhoon Halong did far worse: the storm scoured away as much as sixty feet of ground in places, unburied and up-ended the site, and flung as many as thousands of objects — masks with paint still on them, carvings, pieces of kayak — across the remade shore and out to sea. In the days after, Quinhagak turned out to do “rescue archaeology” on its own beach, and volunteers recovered on the order of a thousand pieces, some carried more than a mile by the surf. The Smithsonian, the BBC, and the Alaskan press have told the site’s story in this frame for years, and it is the true one: a single storm can scatter across the sand what took centuries to accumulate and years to excavate.

The other frame the coverage reaches for is the massacre, and here the project has been more careful than the headlines. The finding of the burned house and its bound dead in the 1650s drew sensational international attention, some of it fastened onto a detail from Yup’ik oral tradition in which the whole cycle of the Bow and Arrow Wars is traced back to a boys’ dart game that turned to injury and revenge. As a “children’s game that sparked a massacre,” it made irresistible copy. The archaeologists have declined that register. They present the war days as documented history — a real period of real conflict, remembered accurately by the community and now confirmed in the ground — and treat the oral record as a source to be correlated with the archaeology, not as a legend to be either debunked or sensationalized. The remains themselves are kept from the cameras; the masks and baskets and dolls are what the public sees.

Fifteen years on, the people who run the dig describe its success as bittersweet, and the phrase is honest. The collection is unrivaled, the museum is full, a generation of Quinhagak young people has grown up with their own ancestors’ hands’ work passing through their own hands — and the site that gave all of it is going into the sea, faster each year, and cannot be saved. What can be saved is being saved, and put where it belongs. The masks that danced the yua in a frozen house four hundred years ago are drying on conservation racks a few miles up the coast, in a village where the same language is still spoken and the same dances are still danced, waiting for the grandchildren who will keep them after the old village itself is gone under the water.

The low coastal tundra and wetland of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, the saturated, treeless country of the Bering Sea coast in which Nunalleq lies. USFWSAlaska, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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