The day after last October’s storm, Jenny Matthew and her husband rode four-wheelers along the beach near Quinhagak, Alaska. “I said to my husband, ‘Look, what’s that?’” she recalled, according to NPR and Alaska Public Media’s KYUK. “We stopped. He got up and took it, and it was that bowl.”
The wooden bowl, carved by Quinhagak residents somewhere between 400 and 600 years ago, was one of thousands of cultural objects the storm had scattered along the coastline, NPR and KYUK reported Saturday. It had washed out of Nunalleq, an archaeological dig site near the village that is renowned as one of the best examples of Alaska Native Yup’ik culture before Western contact.
What the storm did
The remnants of Typhoon Halong swept through western Alaska in October 2025, causing widespread flooding and displacing more than a thousand people across villages off the state’s road system, NPR and KYUK reported. In Quinhagak, the storm shook houses and damaged some buildings and infrastructure. Separately, Warren Jones, CEO of the local Alaska Native corporation Qanirtuuq Inc., told KYUK last October that the surge had peeled back as much as 60 feet of the shoreline bordering the village. “It doesn’t look like our beach no more,” Jones said. “It looks like a bomb hit it.”
At Nunalleq, the storm eroded away more of the buffer of land that had separated the Bering Sea from the buried artifacts, unearthing the bowl in the process, according to NPR and KYUK. During the storm, the site was covered by feet of water; when it receded, it took many valuable objects with it, lead archaeologist Rick Knecht told the outlets. The erosion has left the site more exposed than before — at some high tides now, seawater can reach into the excavation pit. The report said shorelines in the region have grown more vulnerable in part because of decreasing sea ice and permafrost thaw, both fueled by human-caused climate change.
Why Nunalleq matters
Archaeologists have worked at Nunalleq since 2009, when the project began as a partnership between the Yup’ik village of Quinhagak and archaeologists from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, initiated by the community itself to rescue material from a rapidly eroding site and reconnect young people with Yup’ik tradition, according to the university’s project page. Excavators have uncovered a large multi-room house dating to roughly AD 1570-1675, the university says, and as of 2024 the site had produced more than 100,000 artifacts — the most extensive collection of pre-contact Yup’ik material culture in the world. Frozen ground — permafrost — preserved organic material, according to NPR and KYUK, including hand-carved animals, grass rope, sewing needles, ornate wooden masks and pieces of kayaks. A community-run museum, the Nunalleq Culture and Archaeology Center, opened in Quinhagak in 2018, according to the university.
The emergency dig
This past summer, a team of archaeologists returned to Quinhagak for an emergency dig meant to recover as much as possible before the next major storm, the report said. The full site is roughly the size of two Olympic-size pools; the area excavated this summer, covering the remnants of several sod houses — dwellings built with walls of earth and turf — dating back 400 to 500 years, was closer to the size of a backyard pool. The team was made up mostly of volunteers working on a shoestring budget, with funding from groups including the Pacific Northwest Archaeological Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Knecht described the work as “every bit as tough as working in front of bulldozers.” Charlotta Hillerdal, who has worked on the excavation for more than 15 years, was home in Scotland when she heard about the storm damage. “I was crying,” she told NPR and KYUK. “It was a horrible feeling.”
What comes next
Knecht told NPR and KYUK he hopes to bring a team back next summer, and the project is still raising money to do so through a GoFundMe campaign and Quinhagak Heritage Inc., the nonprofit that oversees the dig. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave this for the waves,” he said. “It’s like you might as well take those pieces of artwork we’re finding and skip it off into the Bering Sea.”
Elizabeth Church, director of Quinhagak Heritage Inc., told the outlets that the scramble has taken on new urgency with fall storm season approaching.
Why it matters to Quinhagak
For the community, Church said, the stakes go beyond artifacts. “We all as humans want to know who we are and where we come from, and having the Nunalleq there for us strengthens that,” Church said. “They are interwoven into us as people, and we feel a great sense of responsibility to care for them well, and to take them into the future with us.”