Stone Meeting Houses and Rock Art at Three Lakeside Villages in Alaska's Brooks Range

Long ago, something special happened at three lakeside sites in Noatak National Preserve in northwestern Alaska. Like many sites in the region, likely left by ancestral Inupiat groups, they hold dense clusters of houses and storage pits and signs of caribou hunting. But they also hold large, rock-lined communal houses — qargit — and dozens of petroglyphs. Together, those make them a kind of settlement found nowhere else in Alaska.

Because the sites face threats from erosion, natural disturbance, vandalism and illegal digging, archeologists from the University of Alaska Museum and the National Park Service set out to document and assess them.

A stone-ringed communal house near Burial Lake. NPS

Communal houses

Each village has a large communal house, or qargi. Historic accounts describe qargit as places where villagers gathered, repaired tools and gear, told stories, feasted and held ceremonies. They are known from many Late Prehistoric sites across northern Alaska.

These three, though, are unique: each stands on a massive circular foundation lined with large boulders, which took great effort and coordination to build. They come closer to monumental architecture than anything else known from the American Arctic.

Petroglyphs

The petroglyphs are carved on foundation stones and on other boulders in and around the sites.

A petroglyph with pecked lines and cupules on a large boulder in a qargi's footprint. NPS

Every design is abstract, made by incising or sawing lines, pecking lines, or pecking small cup-shaped hollows (cupules) — often two or three techniques in one design.

Petroglyphs of incised and pecked lines and pecked cupules. NPS

A tradition of its own

Hundreds of rock images are known across Alaska, mostly in the southeast and south-central regions, where they are usually realistic — a human face or figure, an animal. The Arctic has only a handful: 43 panels at 5 sites in northern Alaska — and 41 of those panels, at 3 of those sites, are at these lakeside villages. The northern petroglyphs are abstract, with no obvious picture of anything; the same style turns up at two other sites in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range.

They form a distinct tradition that grew up locally in Arctic Alaska. Their meaning and purpose are still being studied, but they clearly mattered to their makers, and they are a vivid reminder of the social, spiritual and intellectual life of the past.

What the ground holds

Archeologists dug test pits in 34 house features, looking especially for organic material to radiocarbon-date — to learn when each village was lived in, and whether its houses were occupied at the same time. The many houses and storage features, thick middens, and consistent house forms and artifact styles suggest large populations — though it's also possible that only a few houses were occupied at once and the rest built up over a long time.

Well-preserved animal bones show caribou was the main food, with some fishing and hunting or trapping of small mammals and birds. Analysis continues.

Why it matters

These villages show how people thrived in a harsh Arctic climate with few resources. Pairing petroglyph recording with excavation has taught archeologists much about a unique period in Arctic Alaska — and helps protect the sites. Archeological sites are nonrenewable, protected by law, and still important to the heritage of the living Inupiat. They should be treated with respect and kept for future generations.

Sources

Based on "High Alpine Lakeside Villages and Associated Rock Images in the Brooks Range, Alaska," by Scott Shirar, Jeff Rasic and Eric Carlson, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The article describes the foundation boulders as 4–5 feet across and weighing about a hundred pounds, which cannot both be true, so neither figure is given.