Project Goals

A ring of earth mounds, Amchitka. B. Hornbeck, 2019.

The 2019 Rat Islands Earth Mounds project tested hypotheses about the relationships between hunter-fisher-gatherers and the landscape through an archaeological investigation of earth mounds in the western Aleutian Islands, Alaska. 

These mounds were historically believed to be natural places of plant overgrowth that occurred in response to accumulations of bird guano. This project was developed after preliminary studies indicated that these earth mounds had cultural origins and that at least one earth mound was constructed by humans rather than birds. 

The goal of this project was to further explore the depositional history of the earth mounds and to investigate their relationship with known monumental construction in the eastern Aleutian Islands.

The research focused on an investigation of how monumental earth mound constructions can signal and reinforce expressions of group-identity among prehistoric hunter-fisher-gatherer communities.