
Jarmo Kankaanpää taking a break during an archaeological survey by canoe in northern Lapland, 2008. Photograph by Tuija Rankama.
Extremes in the attic and other stories – six years at the Haffenreffer
As a newly-arrived graduate student in the fall of 1990, my first contact with the Haffenreffer involved the reconstruction of the remains of a kayak frame that had originally been discovered abandoned and partially destroyed on the banks of the Noatak River in Alaska. Barbara Hail suggested the project to me after I mentioned having done my MA thesis on kayak typology and evolution. The Noatak kayak had been in storage at the Haffenreffer, first in the attic and later in the wine cellar (a cavern-like, semi-subterranean space behind the exhibit cases on the museum’s back wall). The kayak had been “rediscovered” in the latter the previous spring, but due to damp and insect damage it was in very poor shape. To arrest the insect damage, the disarticulated pieces of the frame had been packed in plastic tubing along with insecticide strips. Parts—specifically all the hull stringers and many of the ribs and deck beams—were missing and the ones still present were so brittle that it would have been impossible to actually assemble the frame. However, the remains did allow me to take measurements, study structural details, and reconstruct the form well enough to identify the type. Unsurprisingly, the kayak turned out to be an archetypal North Alaskan model with a narrow, cigar-shaped hull, a raised foredeck in front of the cockpit but a flat afterdeck, and the slightly upturned ends characteristic of river kayaks of the Noatak and also of the Nunamiut people further inland.
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