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

VANSTONE: TIKCHIK VILLAGE 319Much more difficult, however, is the problem of correctly placingthe Norton Check Stamped ware recovered from late sites on NunivakIsland and from the site being described in this report. In bothcases the collections are so small that the features of the sherds, asidefrom surface treatment, are rendered inconclusive. On the otherhand, I am reasonably certain of the stratigraphic position of theNunivak sherds and completely certain of the position of those foundat Tikchik. Dumond has convincingly demonstrated that in theNaknek drainage ware 1 in any form was not manufactured afterabout 1100 A.D. Therefore, it is inconceivable to him, and to me,that this ware could have survived until the late nineteenth centuryat Tikchik only about 220 kilometers to the northwest. As for theNorton Check Stamped sherds from Nunivak, the answer here wouldseem to depend on the time at which ware 2 replaced ware 1 throughoutAlaska. Since ware 1 seems to include all the Choris and NearIpiutak pottery as well as Norton, it is a widespread manifestationand future excavations may very well show that it was replaced byware 2 throughout Alaska at about the same time as this took placein the Naknek drainage. If the Tikchik and Nunivak sherds withsmall checks belong to ware 1, and this is by no means certain, thenthey are unquestionably intrusive into the deposits from which theywere recovered. If, on the other hand, additional finds should showthat they belong to ware 2, then it would appear that the relationshipof surface treatment to temper, thickness, and shape is not as clearor significant as had previously been supposed.Both Dumond (1965, p. 1244) and Oswalt (1955, p. 39) have suggestedthat large check stamp decoration may be a lineal descendentof the small check stamping and the presence of Nunivak CheckStamped sherds in the Naknek drainage sequence chronologicallylater than those of the Norton type but still belonging to ware 1 demonstratesthe ability of this style of surface treatment to survive abasic change in paste characteristics.In other words, it now appearsvirtually certain that large checks are characteristic of both wares 1and 2. This being the case, it seems altogether possible that futureexcavations will show that Norton check stamping was equally persistentand equally capable of making the transition from one wareto the other. If this should be the case, then it would definitely bequestionable whether fine check stamping, or for that matter any ofthe other forms of surface treatment now associated with ware 1, arenecessarily "the marks of recognition of pre-Ipiutak pottery on thewestern Alaskan mainland" (Giddings, 1964, p. 176).