8:00 am: Despite all the dire warnings of bad weather in the middle of the night, we had a completely uneventful start to our voyage last night. The "Six Ball" waves we were predicted to experience had laid down by the time we got out of Aniva Bay and we've had a very smooth start to our crossing. I suspect that at some point this summer we will have another opportunity to find out what this scaling system is all about.
But for now, I am quite content to have made it through the night without getting knocked around at all!
And now starts another round of waiting. It will take us about 4 days to make the crossing to Chirinkotan Island, which is where we are planning to place the first remote field camp. Last year we had an archaeology survey team visit the island, and they documented a large village site with somewhere on the order of 50 house pits visible on the surface. They also found cultural remains (mostly charcoal, but also some pottery fragments) sandwiched between several layers of volcanic ash, or tephra.
So why are we interested in returning to such a site? Well, this is the kind of site that has the potential to encompass the main scientific goals of the Kuril Biocomplexity Project. In a nut-shell, the goals of the KBP are to: 1) determine the dates that all of these different islands were inhabited by people 2) determine the frequency and intensity of volcanic eruptions 3) determine the frequency and intensity of tsunami events
Bullet number one has actually been extremely well-documented by Dr. Valery Shubin (Sakhalin Regional Museum), the lead Russian archaeologist. He has been working in the Kuril Islands since the early 1970s and knows the cultural chronology extremely well. True, our expeditions have discovered and documented sites that were previously unknown. But the general framework has been known for quite some time.
So you, like our Russian colleagues, may well ask: "why go to all of this effort to determine something that is already fairly well-known?"
The answer is that, in addition to trying to find answers to bullets 1-3, we are trying to determine how the three of them interact. That is, how strongly did numbers 2 and 3 affect the people who were living in the Kurils? There will be lots more discussion of this throughout the summer, but in general, we are trying to document whether or not volcanic eruptions (or tsunamis) of a given magnitude disrupted the lives of the people who were living there at the time.
And how do we do that?
Well, in some cases we can literally see it in the sedimentary record (see photo).
Ben Fitzhugh clears a sedimentary profile to show cultural materials (pottery fragments, charcoal) directly above a yellowish-white volcanic tepra (ash) deposit. At least two additional tephra layers are visible above Ben (they are the portions that appear as ridges that are less eroded than the surrounding sand matrix).
This photo shows Dr. Ben Fitzhugh clearing a sedimentary profile during the 2006 expedition. Just below his right arm is a moderately thick layer of volcanic ash. That ash fell on the people who were living there. Anything they had lying on the ground at the time (pottery, tools, piles of bones from past meals, etc.) would have been buried by that ash.
After the volcanic eruption, people occupied this same spot and left behind the same array of artifacts, which was in turn buried by a much later volcanic eruption (the ash layer visible towards the top of the photo). But were they the same people? Or was the site abandoned for awhile and re-occupied by different people? Do we see different patterns depending on the size of the island they were living on? Or with volcanic eruptions (or tsunamis) of different sizes?
To answer these questions, we need a very tight control of the chronology of when people were and were not inhabiting these islands. We also need to know what cultural group they belonged to, which we will identify by the pottery styles they used (more on that throughout the summer).
We are hopeful that the site at Chirinkotan will provide us with some of the data we need to answer some of these questions. We are also hoping that it will fill in a bit of a gap in our sampling because it is a relatively small island. Living on such a small island, people may have had less of a cushion in terms of access to resources (food, and especially water on this island) that would have helped them survive some of these disruptive events.
OK. I think that's all for now. I'll have three more days of waiting on the ship to write more about the project, and our initial impressions of living on the ship.
--Dr. E