Tikchik village: a nineteenth century riverine community in ... - Cluster

308 FIELDIANA: ANTHROPOLOGY, VOLUME 56scrapers of jfiinty material were recovered from the historic CrowVillage site (Oswalt and VanStone, 1967, pp. 26-27) In the Chagvan.Bay area a sizeable and varied assemblage of flint implements wasrecovered from a house dated by the radiocarbon method at 1693-1773 A.D. (Ackerman, 1964, p. 29). It appears virtually certain thatthe flint artifacts from Tikchik are indigenous and contemporary withthe rest of the collection, since large numbers of flint chips were foundon the floors of several houses. Side scrapers are the most commonform and it is obvious that these and other types continued to fill aneed that could not be met by the Russian and Anglo-Americantechnology available to the villagers. It is tempting to suggest thatskillful flint working may be present into the historic period in manyareas of Alaska and that failure to recognize this is simply due to thesmall number of excavated sites of the period and the general lackof interest in historic archaeology on the part of most Alaskan archaeologists.Further evidence for continuity in stone technology can be notedin the polished stone artifacts for working wood and skin. Of course,the flint scrapers and drills were wood-working tools also and theirpresence suggests that no trade equivalent was satisfactory for finework. The presence of numerous polished stone adzes along withsome of iron, however, would seem to indicate that the latter couldnot be obtained in sufficient quantity to satisfy the needs of thecommunity. Adzes of the two materials are very similar in size andform and must have been roughly equal in efficiency. The stonespecimens, however, would require a great deal of work in their manufactureand it seems certain that those of metal would quickly havereplaced the older type had they been available. A similar assumptionconcerning availability can be noted with reference to the continuedpresence of stone skin-scraping tools.Whetstones, on theother hand, presumably owed their continuity to the fact that theydoubtless functioned equally well for sharpening either stone or metal.These implements are also present in large numbers in the artifactassemblage from Crow Village and for a similar reason (Oswalt andVanStone, 1967, p. 27).One of the most significant features of the excavations was therelative scarcity of raw bone and antler from both the houses andmidden. A table of bone occurrences (Table 4) is interesting not somuch from the standpoint of bulk of material recovered as for thefew species that are represented. It is also significant that very fewbones were recovered from the test trenches. A similar situation at