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

330 FIELDIANA: ANTHROPOLOGY, VOLUME 56ally certain that missionaries did not visit the settlement with anydegree of regularity. Throughout the 1850's and 1860's the missionariesat Alexandrovski were seldom able to visit the villages alongthe Nushagak River more than twice a year and it is doubtless truethat some of the more remote communities, of which Tikchik wascertainly one, were visited less frequently than that. By 1864, allthe Eskimos in villages which the missionary was able to visit hadbeen baptized (DRHA, vol. 1, p. 149), but it is doubtful if Tikchikwas included in this number. More likely it was only those settlementsclose to the redoubt that were strongly influenced by Christianteaching. Inhabitants of the remote settlements, like Tikchik, wouldprobably seldom encounter a priest except when they made theirperiodic trips to the redoubt. The fact that no artifacts associatedwith Christian ritual and practice were recovered from the site wouldseem to further reinforce the impression that the residents were onlymarginal participants in the newly introduced faith, a condition thatprobably persisted as long as the settlement was occupied.Information about the number of people living in the upper NushagakRiver region during the Russian period is very inadequate andinitially it will be necessary to consider a somewhat wider area inorder to learn something about the nature of settlement patterns inthe vicinity of Tikchik. The first estimate for the Kiatagmiut as awhole was made by Vasiliev in 1829, and he set the number at 400(reported by Zagoskin, 1967, p. 308). Shortly after Vasiliev's explorationsthe small pox epidemic of 1837-1838 swept the Kuskokwimand Nushagak River regions infecting more than 500 people ofwhich 200 died (Tikhmenev, 1939-1940, pt. II, pp. 366, 368). Althoughepidemics similar to this one may have been relatively rare,there is every indication that once European diseases had been introduced,they took a yearly toll that may not have been great in termsof numbers of dead, but which greatly weakened the resistance ofthe survivors. It seems certain that the population of Tikchik wouldhave been affected by the increasing prevalence of illness. Zagoskinbelieved that Vasiliev's population figures were too high and was inclinedto reduce the latter's estimate by almost half (1967, p. 308).During the summer of 1964 I conducted an archaeological surveyof Nushagak Bay, the Nushagak River and its tributaries for the expresspurpose of locating settlements that had been occupied during thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In many cases the names,sizes, and approximate locations of the sites had been extracted fromhistorical sources prior to the field work.It was determined as a re-