SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Last October, remnants of a typhoon swept through western Alaska causing widespread flooding and displacing hundreds of people from their homes. But for the village of Quinhagak, it also flooded a critical piece of their past, an archaeological dig site. KYUK's Samantha Watson reports on efforts to excavate that past before it's gone.
SAMANTHA WATSON, BYLINE: The day after ex-Typhoon Halong hit their coastal village, Jenny Matthew and her husband rode a four-wheeler along the torn-up beach assessing the damage. Suddenly, something caught her eye.
JENNY MATTHEW: I said to my husband, look, what's that? We stopped. He got up and took it, and it was that bowl.
WATSON: The bowl was wooden and smooth. It was carved by Quinhagak residents around 500 years ago. The storm had unearthed it from an archaeological dig site called Nunalleq that sits near the village. It's one of the best examples of Yup'ik culture and life before Western contact. The storm scattered thousands of these artifacts along the coastline.
MATTHEW: That's when we started riding slowly to look for artifacts (ph).
WATSON: Now a team of archaeologists is here on an emergency dig to recover as much as possible before the next big storm. Charlotta Hillerdal is one of them. She's been coming to this dig site for years. She was home in Scotland when she heard about the artifacts.
CHARLOTTA HILLERDAL: I was crying. It was a horrible feeling.
WATSON: The whole archaeological site is about the size of two Olympic-sized pools, but the emergency dig area is smaller, about the size of a backyard pool. It's a hole that has been dug around the buried remnants of several sod houses that are centuries old. Hillerdal and others have been systematically digging deeper and deeper down.
(SOUNDBITE OF TROWEL DIGGING)
WATSON: Her trowel touches something solid, and she brushes away the dirt to reveal the stern face of a wooden doll.
HILLERDAL: So we have - find quite a lot of these, but this one is nice because it looks like it has a painted face, which is quite unusual.
WATSON: Archaeologist Rick Knecht leads the dig. He says thawing permafrost revealed significant amounts of these objects in the early 2000s. The community decided to save these pieces of their culture and contact him. Knecht says they've watched the Bering Sea creep closer and closer to the site. Shorelines in this part of Alaska are now more vulnerable to erosion due in part to decreasing sea ice and permafrost thaw. Both trends are fueled by human-caused climate change. Last October's storm closed the distance even more. Now, at some high tides, seawater can reach into the pit.
RICK KNECHT: That's tough. It's like every bit as tough as working in front of bulldozers.
WATSON: In October, the flooding was so extensive that the site was covered by feet of water that took many valuable objects when it receded. They're worried it could happen again.
KNECHT: I'll be d***ed if I'm going to leave this for the waves. It's like, you might as well take all these pieces of artwork we're finding and skip it off into the Bering Sea.
WATSON: That artwork includes hand-carved animals, sewing needles, ornate wooden masks and pieces of kayaks.
ELIZABETH CHURCH: We all, as humans, want to know who we are and where we come from. And having the Nunalleq there for us strengthens that.
WATSON: Elizabeth Church is the director of Quinhagak Heritage Inc., a nonprofit that oversees the Nunalleq dig. It also manages a cultural center that stores all the artifacts. Church says seeing the artifacts exploded onto the beach was traumatic. It underscored the community's desire to steward their ancestors' belongings.
CHURCH: They are interwoven into us as people. We feel a great sense of responsibility to care for them well and to take them into the future with us.
WATSON: She also says that many of the objects recovered show a history of resilience and inventiveness. There's evidence of people adapting to environmental change and making technological progress.
CHURCH: When you know that you come from a people that were so resilient and so capable and so talented and so smart, you get a boost, and it's amazing.
WATSON: As the community is still repairing storm damage to homes and infrastructure, that boost might be of use right now. For NPR News, I'm Samantha Watson in Quinhagak, Alaska. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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