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

VANSTONE: TIKCHIK VILLAGE 343United States government at the time of cession and currently depositedin the National Archives, are just beginning to be used byethnographically oriented historians and the vast Alaska ChurchCollection in the Library of Congress, which records the activities ofthe Russian Orthodox Church throughout Alaska, has hardly beentouched.Beyond these standard but little known sources, the diariesof missionaries, school teachers, traders, and others must be soughtout and studied.Inventories of trade goods covering a long periodof time at a particular trading post may yield data on material culturepersistence and change which archaeological excavation has notA study of nineteenth century trade materials in museumproduced.collections might be expected to provide similar useful information.The point is, that as far as the utilization of historical source materialis concerned, we have just scatched the surface.There may belittle more we can do at present to improve the quality and quantityof data obtained through archaeology and ethnography, but our workis just beginning as far as the use of written sources is concerned.Allowing for the fact that more thorough work with historicalsources is necessary, it is still possible to say that we already knowa great deal about the Nushagak River and its population in thenineteenth century. I have presented this data in some detail elsewhere(VanStone, 1967) and it has been sketched in broad outline inthe various chapters of this report. However, there is still much tobe learned. A few elderly informants in communities along the riverremain to be interviewed, but the main question concerns the extentand value of additional archaeological excavations. Just what canwe expect to determine by digging more historic sites in the area?Will these be able to fill gaps that still exist because of various inadequaciesin the Tikchik collections? Although it has become increasinglyapparent from the excavations at Crow Village and at Tikchikthat some of the major questions concerning culture change may notbe answerable through archaeology, I nevertheless feel that we cannotbe certain of this on the basis of one excavated site on the KuskokwimRiver and another in the Nushagak region. In the latter area,for example, it would seem to be worthwhile to search for a site withpreservation in order to give a more complete picture of traditionalEskimo material culture. It seems unlikely that such a site will befound on the river itself, but frozen sites have been reported in thearea contiguous to Nushagak Bay (Larsen, 1950) At the same time,.the excavation of one or more settlements on the Nushagak Riveritself might add to the number of known trade goods types for the