Four armed, armored figures display Tlingit war gear created by Sitka’s Tommy Joseph as part of the Alaska State Museum’s “Rainforest Warriors” exhibit April 29, 2013. Such helmets and armor were the topic of a Dec. 1, 2016, lecture by the Alaska State Museum’s Steve Hendrickson. (Photo by Ed Schoenfeld/CoastAlaska News)

Tlingit battle helmets were designed to inspire fear. The thick, wooden head armor carried imagery of strong warriors, fierce animals or revered ancestors.

But helmets also played a ceremonial role, representing clans or helping shamans scout behind enemy lines.

Steve Henrickson discusses Tlingit armor during a Dec. 1, 2016, lecture in Juneau. To the left, Preston Singletary’s house pole depicts an armored warrior. (Photo by Ed Schoenfeld/CoastAlaska News)

When Alexander Baranov led Russian fur traders into Southeast in the late 1700s, he met some fierce resistance.

The Alaska State Museum’s Steve Henrikson said Tlingit warriors appeared one night within their camp.

“He has a very vivid description of how terrified this made everybody seem because these big figures just materialized in the middle of their camp. Because of the layers of padding, they were all really big and tall. The helmet might add another 6 to 8 inches,” he said.

But they were exceptions. Henrikson, the museum’s collections curator, said most warriors did battle with little to protect them, beyond animal hides.

The carved, painted helmets, bentwood face shields and wooden body armor was just too bulky.

“The types of battles that they had often required lots of quick movements and if you’re wearing that armor, it’s fairly heavy and bulky and it restricts your movements. So it would only be employed in very strategic ways,” he said.

Henrikson presented images and information at a Dec. 1, 2016, Sealaska Heritage Institute lecture, Terrifying Visages:  Armored Warriors of the Northern Northwest Coast, at the Walter Soboleff Building in Juneau.

He showed examples of helmets adorned with sea lion whiskers and animal skins.

“Some helmets used the headskin of a bear, a brown bear stretched over a plain, wooden form,” he said.

Battle helmets were thick, made out of burls and other off-grain pieces of wood, which were harder to penetrate or crack.

Henrickson said the origins and ages of many are not known. But one whale design points to a possible origin.

“This one has a seal in its mouth and that may point to it being from the Killer Whale Chasing Seal House of Angoon,” he said.

Steve Henrikson has found nearly 100 battle helmets made by northern Northwest Coast Natives at the Sealaska Heritage Institute in downtown Juneau. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO)

Henrikson and his fellow researchers have tracked down nearly 100 helmets in museums in the U.S. and overseas.

And sometimes they just show up at an auction. That was the case for one recent find, which appears to represent a merganser, a crested duck with a serrated beak found in Alaska waters.

“Again, no documentation. It was just found in a castle in France. But it’s purely Tlingit,” he said.

He said there’s no question Southeast’s Haidas and Tsimshians made armor too. But so far, most examples are Tlingit.

Armor was made of wood, animal hides or both, sometimes held together by sinew or yarn.

Henrickson said they were strengthened by other materials, including outdated Chinese coins brought in by Russian fur traders.

“They were able to get a good deal on them and they brought them out here and Northwest Coast Natives used them for decorating their regalia but also to maybe make the armor more impermeable to bullets and buckshot,” he said.

That only worked for a while. Early firearms were often weak and inaccurate. As guns gained strength, armor became no match.

But it still had ceremonial use, which continues to this day. And, a number of modern artists have created their own versions for display or use in dance groups.

Hear the full lecture Terrifying Visages: Armored Warriors of the Northern Northwest Coast, with Alaska State Museum Curator of Collections Steve Henrikson.

Steve Henrikson gives a presentation Dec.1, 2016, on wearable armor worn by northern Northwest Coast Natives at the Sealaska Heritage Institute in downtown Juneau. Henrikson is Alaska State Museum’s curator of collections. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO)

The 1904 Potlatch canoe outside the former Russian-American Company Warehouse. This image was scanned from one of hundreds of glass plate negatives exposed by Harry Marcus Weston Edmonds during his tenure performing magnetic survey work in Sitka. The plates were found in the archives of the Carnegie Institute by NOAA historian John Cloud. (Photo: Harry Marcus Weston Edmonds/courtesy The Carnegie Institution)

Whether it’s searching for gold in a sunken Russian ship, or finding historical nuggets in the dusty archives of a Washington museum, the researchers of the Alaska Anthropological Association are on it.

The group is holding it 43rd annual meeting this year in Sitka, through March 5th on the Sheldon Jackson Fine Arts Campus.

Here’s a look two of the many papers and presentations scheduled for the weekend.

AK_Anthropological Association 43rd meeting Program Booklet

Downloadable audio.

Find a complete schedule of this weekend’s meeting of the Alaska Anthropological Association in Sitka.

It’s been called the most important ship to sail Alaskan waters, and it’s certainly the most important ship to sink here.

The Russian merchant-frigate Neva was built on the Thames River in London in 1800, and wrecked on Cape Edgecumbe, just outside of Sitka 13 years later.

In the meantime, the Neva circumnavigated the globe twice. It was the first Russian ship to call in Hawaii. The first Russian ship to call in Australia.

And, it reshaped the history of Alaska.

Dave McMahan is the former state archaeologist. He’s been searching for the Neva since the late 1970s — but he’s no treasure-hunter. The ship was at the heart of a pivotal conflict between worlds.

A contemporary watercolor by Mark R. Meyers shows the Neva under tow in Sitka Sound.

“She’s probably best-known in Alaska for her fortuitous involvement in the Battle of Sitka. The ship just happened to be in Kodiak, when Baranov was trying to establish his settlement here in Sitka. And Lisianski and the Neva came and assisted Baranov at the Battle of Sitka. So she’s famous or infamous depending on your perspective. I always like to say, We come here to bury Caesar, not to praise him. I’m not making a judgement. We’re only looking for the facts. We want to develop a timeline on the Neva’s history, and we want to replace some of the lore of the sea with scientific outcomes.”

Some of that lore is that the Neva was loaded with gold. At this presentation before Sitka’s Chamber of Commerce, an audience member asked McMahan about it. He’s not showing any cards.

“Well you hear stories like that. Any shipwreck in Alaska is laden with gold, full of treasure and all that. We just don’t know yet.”

In all likelihood the Neva was not carrying gold when it went to the bottom below Mt. Edgecumbe in 1813. It was carrying supplies for Russia’s Sitka colony, and a long-awaited replacement for Russian-American Company chief manager Alexander Baranov, who was ready to retire. It held 77 passengers, 26 of whom managed to go ashore on Kruzof Island and establish a camp, where they survived for nearly a month before the arrival of a rescue party from the colony.

With support from a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, McMahan and his team completed an archaeological excavation of the survivor camp last summer. The Neva itself has not been found.

Slideshow: Sitka Scenes from the Harry Marcus Weston Edmonds collection at the Carnegie Institution, Washington, DC.

EDMONDS1 - Copy

EDMONDS2 - Copy

EDMONDS3

EDMONDS4 - Copy

EDMONDS5 - Copy

EDMONDS6 - Copy

EDMONDS7

EDMONDS8

EDMONDS9

EDMONDS10

EDMONDS11

EDMONDS12

EDMONDS13

EDMONDS14

EDMONDS15

EDMONDS16

EDMONDS17

A government historian, however, did strike gold — last fall in the archives of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC.

John Cloud is officially a map historian for the NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Last year he unearthed the story of Harry Marcus Weston Edmonds, who was sent to Sitka at the turn of the last century to study the earth’s magnetic field.

He did that and much more.

“Edmonds was here as the magnetic observer for the original beginnings of the observatory. He was also an ethnographer — what we would call an anthropologist now — and he did a lot of work with Eskimos, Inupiaq people, around Norton Sound and St. Michael. He overwintered for two winters above the Arctic Circle on the Porcupine River with Gwich’in, and he became a great photographer. In October, in the archives of the Carnegie Institute in Washington, there were hundreds of glass plate negatives that nobody had opened up and looked at for more than a century.”

Cloud has been scanning the plates for his presentation to the Alaska Anthropological Association. Many are of scenes in Sitka: the landscape surrounding the magnetic observatory, the waterfront, and formal portraits of the totem poles in what would eventually become Sitka National Monument, and later national park.

The work by John Cloud and Dave McMahan are not the only surprises at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Alaska Anthropological Association. Also in the lineup for this year’s conference are presentations on coastal and Arctic anthropology, indigenous cartography, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA.

It’s a four-day meeting with dozens of sessions. But in John Cloud’s world, there is never enough time.

“That’s one of the great things about history. There’s always new old things.”

KCAW’s Rich McClear contributed to this story.