The first sign came as a wooden doll, lying on the beach near Quinhagak in 2007. It was smooth, carved, unmistakably old, and it had no business being there — not on the sand, not in the open, not where the next fall storm could take it. More objects followed with each tide: masks, bowls, shafts of hunting gear, all of them spilling out of the tundra like something the land could no longer hold.
The source was a site known to local Elders by oral tradition and named by them Nunalleq — "the old village." It was the remains of a Yup'ik settlement that predated the first European contact in Alaska by centuries, and it was disappearing. Melting permafrost had softened the ground that once held it firm, and the loss of sea ice meant bigger waves and more punishing storm surges. Chunks of earth were calving off the bluff and washing into the Bering Sea, carrying the belongings of ancestors with them.
For the Yup'ik people of the region, the decision to disturb such a place was not a small one. Settlements of the ancestors were traditionally left untouched. But the community of Quinhagak recognized that this was a special case — that the choice was not between excavating and leaving the site alone, but between recovering what could be saved and watching all of it go into the water. There was another motive, too. If the objects could be recovered, younger members of the community might forge a deeper connection with a heritage that was in danger of slipping away along with the coastline.
So the village called in Rick Knecht, an archaeologist then at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland with long experience excavating in Alaska. Warren Jones, director of Qanirtuuq Inc., the village's Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act corporation, was the driving force behind the effort. "We landed there," Knecht later recalled, "and right away found a complete wooden doll on the beach. We followed the tide line and saw more and more evidence of wooden artifacts. A couple miles down the beach, we could see where they were coming from."
What they found was a large, multi-room house occupied roughly between AD 1570 and 1675, according to the University of Aberdeen's project records. Carbon dating of grasses and berry seeds suggests people first lived at the site in the 1300s. At some point around 1640 or 1650, the house was attacked and set on fire — burned material at the site provides the evidence — during the period of regional conflict that Yup'ik oral tradition calls the Bow and Arrow Wars. The wars, by that tradition, came to an end only when the Russians arrived in the 1830s.
In 2009, the community and the archaeologists formally established the Nunalleq Archaeology Project, a partnership between the village of Quinhagak, Qanirtuuq Inc., and the University of Aberdeen. It was, from the start, an unusual arrangement. Qanirtuuq owns all of the artifacts recovered from the site, and the corporation made a decision that set the project apart from most archaeology conducted in Alaska: every single object would stay in Quinhagak.
The scale of what came out of the ground is difficult to overstate. Summer volunteers found hundreds of artifacts a day. The collection grew to include tools, dolls, masks, clothing, hunting gear, and the ordinary objects of daily life — a record of Yup'ik culture before contact unmatched anywhere in the world. The precise count depends on when and whom you ask: the University of Aberdeen's project page cited more than 100,000 artifacts as of 2024; the Anchorage Museum's exhibition page puts the figure above 200,000. What is not in dispute is that Nunalleq has produced the most extensive collection of pre-contact Yup'ik material culture ever assembled.
As soon as objects came out of the ground, though, they began to deteriorate rapidly — centuries of preservation in frozen ground undone by exposure to air. Conservation became as urgent as excavation. In August 2018, nine years after the digging began, the Nunalleq Culture and Archaeology Center opened in Quinhagak, a community-run museum built to hold the collection in the village where it belonged. At the opening, Quinhagak children gathered with world-renowned mask-makers around the collection's ancient dolls and ulus. Warren Jones, asked about the moment, said he almost broke down. "It's our culture," he said. "It's priceless to us. And they will be here with us forever. When I'm gone, when we're gone, they'll be in the village. And future generations can come at any time and look at them, and never forget where they came from." Knecht called it the highlight of his professional career. "We looked at each other and shook hands," he said of Jones. "Because we'd done it."
The work did not end with the museum. In October 2025, the remnants of Typhoon Halong swept through western Alaska, displacing more than a thousand people across the region and killing at least one. Quinhagak was largely spared the worst of the damage, but the storm stripped away as much as 60 feet of shoreline and churned thousands of artifacts out of the ground. The day after it hit, Jenny Matthew and her husband rode four-wheelers along the torn-up beach to assess what had happened. The wind and floodwaters had peeled the tundra up like discarded carpeting. "I said to my husband, 'Look, what's that?'" Matthew remembered. "We stopped. He got up and took it, and it was that bowl." It was wooden and smooth, carved by Quinhagak residents somewhere between 400 and 600 years ago. The following summer, a team of archaeologists returned to the village for an emergency dig to recover as much as possible before the next big storm.
That is the story the Anchorage Museum is now telling. Nunalleq: The Old Village opens October 2, 2026, and runs through April 4, 2027, in the museum's first-floor East Wing Education Hallway and second-floor West Wing. It is an installation rather than a grand touring exhibition, introducing visitors to a community-led effort in which Elders, youth, and researchers work side by side, sharing knowledge, language, stories, and scientific methods. The artifacts on view — tools, dolls, masks, clothing, hunting gear — are the everyday objects of people who lived on that coast four centuries ago.
What makes the project genuinely rare is not only what was found but who controlled it. Archaeology in Alaska has often meant objects leaving the communities they came from, bound for distant museums and storerooms. At Nunalleq, the village corporation owned the finds, the village decided they would stay, and the village built the museum to hold them. The excavation was framed from the beginning as something more than research: a way of strengthening Yup'ik culture and identity, reconnecting younger generations with ancestral knowledge, and keeping stories in the place where they began.
The Yup'ik people have lived in the region around Quinhagak for more than 1,500 years. The objects at Nunalleq — the dolls and masks and hunting gear, the carved representations of seals that speak to how central those animals were to life on the Bering Sea coast — survived four centuries in frozen ground only to be threatened in a matter of decades by a warming climate. The community's answer was to go out and get them, one summer at a time, before the sea could finish the job. The exhibition in Anchorage is a chance to see what they saved, and to understand that the saving was the point.