Daily Sitka Sentinel

Archaeologists Find Grave, More Neva Artifacts

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of a three-part series about a project revealing new evidence about the wreck of the Russian-American ship Neva and its survivors.

By Dave McMahan

Principal Investigator

Neva Archaeology Project

Archaeologists located the first traces of the NEVA in 2012 when remains of cooking fires and Russian axes were found along the rugged coast of Kruzof Island. Beginning in August 2012, several attempts at underwater survey were conducted through the use of a marine magnetometer, sonar, and scuba dives.

The dense kelp, iron-laden rocks, and frequent heavy seas, however, made these efforts all but impossible. Armed with a National Science Foundation grant and working closely with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska and U.S. Forest Service, specialists from the United States, Canada, and Russia returned to the site in 2015. Their excavations uncovered traces of an early Russian-period camp where the scientists recovered period navigator’s chart dividers, ships nails, and battered gunflints likely used to spark warming fires. Pieces of copper hull sheathing were found cut and fashioned into possible awls, and a crude fishhook. Burned bone and shell at the site was found to be wild game and shellfish. Many artifacts were clearly those of the lost NEVA crew. The team also discovered a previously unknown Tlingit camp, occupied at least 50 years after the shipwreck.

Archaeologist Dave McMahan holds up one of the artifacts uncovered on Kruzof Island in July. (Photo provided by Dave McMahan)

In 2016 the team returned to further study the site. Eroded from the survivors’ camp was a scabbard fragment of bronze or brass, possibly from a Naval-style dirk or dagger. More scraps of copper hull sheathing were found, hammered into useful survival items. Additional cooking fires and food bones were found, confirming the NEVA survivors were organized enough to send out parties to fish, scavenge, and even dispatch deer. The crew appeared to occupy a single large camp, possibly in makeshift tents or shelters salvaged from sailcloth and other wreckage.

But some of the most significant finds were made in the closing days of the 2016 project, discoveries that left the team stunned.

In 2016 scientists adjusted the survey, searching a wider area along the coast looking for other traces of the ship and crew. Not long after, the team stumbled on a large piece of iron in plain sight, wrapped in the arm-like roots of an ancient tree.

Careful excavation revealed a large iron yard brace (i.e., an iron fitting used on the spars of a sailing ship), as well as a nearby hand-wrought drift pin used to tie together ship timbers. Collectively, these nautical items and artifacts provided the first indisputable evidence of a late 18th or early 19th century Russian sailing ship, the NEVA.

Other finds followed, including a stacked cache of Russian axes, hardware, cannon grapeshot, and sheets of copper, some showing stresses of being wrenched from a wooden hull. Axes also littered the nearby survivors’ camp where they could have been used with flint to spark fires, cut firewood, or re-handled to help build shelters. This major cache provided the first evidence that at least some of the broken ship was driven ashore and harvested. Even in her dying throes, the NEVA offered crucial materials to her shaken crew.

Ironically, this most diagnostic evidence of the NEVA was not found in the kelp-choked ocean where magnetometer, side scan sonar, and diving efforts were so far unsuccessful, but onshore where its shattered cargo was dragged ashore more than 200 years ago. The location of the cache is a significant piece of the puzzle, allowing future researchers to narrow down where cannon, ballast, and other wreckage still remain hidden.

 FRIDAY: New picture emerges ofsurvior camp.