An Alaska storm scattered artifacts. Archaeologists are racing to save what's left

A crew of volunteer excavators and archaeologists searches the soil for artifacts at the Nunalleq dig site near the coastal village of Quinhagak, Alaska, on June 8. MaryCait Dolan/KYUK hide caption

Last October, remnants of Typhoon Halong swept through western Alaska — causing widespread flooding and displacing over a thousand people in multiple far-flung villages off the state's road system.

In the coastal village of Quinhagak, the storm shook houses and damaged some buildings and infrastructure. And the day after it hit, Jenny Matthew and her husband rode four-wheelers along the torn-up beach, assessing the damage.

The wind and floodwaters had peeled the tundra up like discarded carpeting. And as Matthew scanned the debris, suddenly, something caught her eye.

"I said to my husband, 'Look, what's that?' We stopped. He got up and took it, and it was that bowl," Matthew remembered.

The bowl was wooden and smooth. It was carved by Quinhagak residents somewhere between 400 and 600 years ago and was one of thousands of cultural objects scattered along the coastline.

The storm had unearthed it from an archaeological dig site called Nunalleq that sits near the village. It's renowned as one of the best examples of Alaska Native Yup'ik culture before Western contact and serves as an important link to Quinhagak's past. Not only had the storm scattered many objects from the site, it also increased the risks for what was still in the ground by eroding more of the land buffer between the Bering Sea and where these artifacts are buried.

This past summer, a team of archaeologists came to the village for an emergency dig to recover as much as possible before the next big storm.