Archaeologists Race to Save Yup’ik Artifacts in Alaska
QUINHAGAK, Alaska — Nearly a year after the remnants of Typhoon Halong peeled back up to 60 feet of shoreline along this Yup’ik coastal village, archaeologists and community members are in a race against time to recover ancestral artifacts before the next storm season—and before the Bering Sea claims the rest.
The late-night storm of Oct. 11-12, 2025, brought hurricane-force winds and record flooding across Western Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, displacing more than a thousand people and devastating villages including Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. Quinhagak, home to roughly 800 people, was spared the worst of the house-to-house destruction—but the storm submerged the nearby Nunalleq archaeological site under several feet of water and scattered thousands of cultural objects along the beach and out to sea.
“It’s like you took our museum and sprinkled it out on the beach,” lead archaeologist Rick Knecht told KYUK in the days after the storm.
A Trove of Yup’ik Heritage
Nunalleq is widely regarded as the largest trove of pre-contact Yup’ik cultural treasures ever excavated—a village occupied roughly 400 to 500 years ago, during the Little Ice Age. Since digging began in 2009, researchers and Quinhagak residents have recovered more than 100,000 objects, which now anchor the collection of the community’s Nunalleq Culture and Archaeology Center, a museum and lab that holds the world’s largest collection of Yup’ik artifacts.
The site has long been a community-based partnership: after thawing permafrost revealed artifacts in the early 2000s, the village deliberated and chose to launch a rescue effort to save pieces of its own heritage. That model has made the project as much about the future as the past.
But climate change has made the site increasingly fragile. Decreasing sea ice, thawing permafrost and land subsidence have left the coastline more vulnerable to storm-driven erosion. Knecht has said the site loses roughly 3 feet of coast each year—and that “a big enough storm could wipe it off the map.”
That storm arrived last October.
The Storm and the Scramble
The day after Halong hit, Quinhagak resident Jenny Matthew and her husband rode four-wheelers along the torn-up beach. As debris from the peeled-back tundra lay scattered around them, something caught her eye.
“I said to my husband, ‘Look, what’s that?’” Matthew remembered. “We stopped. He got up and took it, and it was that bowl.”
The wooden bowl had been carved by Quinhagak residents centuries ago. It was one of thousands of objects the storm scattered along miles of coastline. Another resident, Jimmy Jones, found a rare, unusually well-preserved full mask—so intact that layers of paint were still visible.
According to the Anchorage Daily News, locals and volunteers recovered roughly 1,000 pieces within days. Knecht estimated that as many as 100,000 objects—about as many as were recovered in more than 15 years of digging—may have been swept out to sea, along with 200 to 300 cubic meters of unexcavated material.
“That’s raw sewage we’re talking about,” Warren Jones, CEO of the village corporation Qanirtuuq Inc., told KYUK, describing the community’s separate infrastructure crisis. The storm brought Quinhagak’s 10-acre sewage lagoon to within about 30 feet of the shore, raising fears that one more storm could send untreated waste into Kuskokwim Bay. “It doesn’t look like our beach no more,” Jones said. “It looks like a bomb hit it.”
A Summer of Emergency Digging
This past summer, an emergency three-week dig brought archaeologists and volunteers back to Nunalleq before fall storm season. On a shoestring budget funded largely by volunteers and small grants, the crew worked with unusual urgency—not searching the dirt twice to save time.
The effort produced a significant scientific find. A recovered carved wooden mask bearing a half-circle symbol—the Yup’ik “eye of awareness,” denoting the universe—allowed researchers to identify the same motif on the bottoms of bowls, solving a long-standing archaeological mystery.
“Never could figure out what that was,” Knecht said. “Thanks to that mask … we can make that jump.”
Archaeologist Charlotta Hillerdal, who has worked the site for more than 15 years, unearthed a wooden doll with a rare painted face. She was in Scotland when she learned the site had flooded. “I was crying,” she said. “It was a horrible feeling.”
Resilience, Past and Present
For Quinhagak’s residents, the artifacts are far more than archaeological specimens. “We all as humans want to know who we are and where we come from, and having the Nunalleq there for us strengthens that,” said Elizabeth Church, director of Quinhagak Heritage Inc.
Lynn Marie Church, CEO of Nalaquq, a subsidiary of the tribal corporation, framed the recovery as part of a longer story of adaptation. Knecht has drawn a parallel to the site’s original inhabitants, who weathered the Little Ice Age 500 years ago by adjusting their hunting and carving intricate works indoors.
“That’s how you get through a climate crisis and change,” Knecht said. “You get together, you share ideas, you share technologies, and it’s exactly what happened here at the site 400 years ago.”
What’s Next
The immediate concern is the calendar: fall storm season is approaching, and the site remains exposed. The team hopes to return in summer 2027 but is still raising money through Quinhagak Heritage Inc. and a GoFundMe campaign.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave this for the waves,” Knecht said. “It’s like running into a library or museum that’s on fire, and we’re just running out with arm loads of what we can save.”
As Byron Phillips, land manager for Qanirtuuq Inc., put it, the question is no longer whether Nunalleq can be saved in place—but how much can be carried out before the sea returns.
For Quinhagak, the answer may shape what the next generation knows about who they are.