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

them.VANSTONE: TIKCHIK VILLAGE 351Toward the end of this first occupation phase, some disaster,possibly the small pox epidemic of 1837-1838, overtook the residentsand resulted in the deaths of several persons. In their haste to abandonthis unlucky spot, the survivors buried on the benches of thehouses those who were the last to die and quickly departed. Nowperhaps there was a period of a few years during which no one at alllived at Tikchik; not long, probably, but long enough so that peoplewould forget why the place had been abandoned. Then the secondoccupation phase would begin, this time involving houses 1, 2, 4, 7,and 8, again with probably no more than two or three occupied atthe same time. At the close of the century, illness once more visitedTikchik, this time resulting in the gradual abandonment ot the occupiedhouses until perhaps only those living in house 7 remained andthen they, too, departed. Admittedly, this sequence, and particularlythe supposed gap between the two occupations, rests on verythin evidence. A glance at the site map (Fig. 3) will show that thehouses belonging to phase one and those to phase two do not occurspatially in any suggestive groupings except that the earlier housesdo appear, for the most part, to be located around the peripheries ofthe site and, with one exception, well back from the river bank. Thepopulation of 31 at the settlement in 1879 doubtless suggests theoptimum number of persons who could have been living at Tikchikat any one time. Although the site as it appears today is one of thelargest in the Nushagak River region, it seems certain that at no timewas it ever as large as a number of villages on the Nushagak Riveritself where greater mobility throughout the year would permit alarger concentration of population in the home village during thesummer months.