Capt. Mark Cawthorn, commanding officer of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Munro, retired Tuesday after 27 years of service with the Coast Guard. He was relieved of his duties as commanding officer by Capt. Jeff Thomas during a change of command ceremony at the Golden Anchor. Thomas arrived from Coast Guard Headquarters where he served as assistant director for the Office of Emerging Policy. Cawthorn commanded the 378-foot Kodiak-based cutter Munro for two years, and sailed 55,000 miles with his crew of 175. They inspected fishing boats, worked a high seas driftnet case, spent hundreds of hours on search and rescue missions, and saved the lives of three people in the last year. Cawthorn has taken the Munro to Japan, the South China Sea, and around all the islands in the Aleutian Chain. “I always knew this would be my last ship, I just did not know it would be the final assignment of my career,” Cawthorn said. Rear Adm. Charles Ray, deputy commander of the Pacific Area, traveled from California to preside at the ceremony. Ray spoke to Cawthorn’s leadership and dedication, as well as the achievements of the crew of the Munro. “They spent 300 days underway in the last two years, and every one of those days was a challenge,” Ray said. Cawthorn has spent 13 years of his career at sea, and served on cutters Ute, Pegasus and Thetis out of Key West, Fla. He served as executive officer of the cutter Escanaba, and the commanding officer of cutters Monomoy and Seneca, out of Massachusetts. “He sailed around the world,” Ray said of Cawthorn’s career. “He crossed the Arctic Circle, he crossed the Equator, and he crossed the International Dateline. He’s done all those things and seen all those things.” Cawthorn also spent tours of duty at Coast Guard headquarters, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Cawthorn and his family will leave Kodiak for Honolulu. His wife Deb is an active-duty Coast Guard lieutenant commander and his daughter Leah is a high school senior. Cawthorn’s son Jacob was not present because he is currently stationed aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Seneca. During his farewell remarks, Cawthorn thanked his family and his crew for the support they provided him during his time as commanding officer, and shared memories and stories of life onboard the Munro. “From the time my wife and I arrived in Alaska two years ago it has been one incredible adventure after another,” Cawthorn said. Cawthorn received a Meritorious Service Medal during the ceremony. Contact Mirror writer Nicole Klauss at nklauss@kodiakdailymirror.com.

It hasn’t been hard for Merissa Koller Williams to keep a group of teenage girls interested in volleyball for the past three months. They’re looking forward to a trip to Phoenix, Ariz. “The fact that they get to get off the island and in the sun for awhile has been big,” Koller Williams said. That might sound strange considering Kodiak’s unusually warm June. The girls won’t be outside much. Instead, they will be in the air-conditioned Phoenix Convention Center playing a ton of volleyball. The Kodiak Island Volleyball Club is taking eight girls to play in the six-day Volleyball Festival that begins Sunday. More than 200 teams will be playing on 107 courts in the convention center during the national tournament that features players from ages 12 and under to 18. “The extra few months of playing time, and the amount of competition that we will see down there will improve their game,” Koller Williams said. “It is a huge event and they will get to see a lot of things they wouldn’t have otherwise.” Most of the girls on the team are high school varsity players from last season and will compete in the 17s division. The team is guaranteed at least four games a day. Headlining the team are rising seniors Hannah Wandersee, Carissa Cannon, Summer McKechnie and Megan Pyles. Also making the trip are Erika Fallorin, Kyla Villaroya, Kalameli Matautia and Isabelle Riina. Koller Williams believes the team can finish in the top half of their division. “I have been watching film from other teams that I know we will see,” she said. “I watched the semifinal match from last year and I think we are going to compete neck-in-neck.” The club has been practicing since April 1 to prepare for the trip and played an exhibition Monday evening against a Kodiak High School alumni team that had a roster full of college experience. The club lost, but not by more than five points in any set. “This extra court time has allowed us to teach them other aspects of the game other than skills,” Koller Williams said. “Where as during the high school season we spend so much time catching them up on things that they haven’t been doing.” Koller Williams joined the KHS volleyball staff this past fall and coached the C squad. Before that she coached in Minnesota. Also coaching on the trip is former KHS star Jasmine Oliver. The team fundraised for the trip and last week was only $3,000 away from their $16,000 goal. This is the third time the Kodiak Island Volleyball Club has taken a team to the Volleyball Festival. The first team went in 2008 to Reno, Nev. and in 2009 the club took two teams to Phoenix. Contact Mirror writer Derek Clarkston at sports@kodiakdailymirror.com.

On a small hill surrounded by boggy muskeg in the Tanana River Valley, prehistoric skin scrapers made of schist, polished slate tools and glass beads were uncovered in the last week. Based on the design of the tools and the way the animals were butchered, it appears to be an Athabascan campsite from the turn of the 20th century. “These are very typical Athabascan tools. But you usually think of polished stone tools with the Eskimo area, not in the Interior, so it’s very interesting,” says Chuck Holmes, the archaeologist who first discovered the site several decades ago. He’s leading a team of 10 graduate students and volunteers at the excavation through June. Swan Point is just north of Delta Junction. You can see the Alaska Range to the south, the Yukon-Tanana Uplands to the north, and Donnelly Dome just across the valley. Fourteen thousand years ago, before the boreal forest grew, the views were even better. “It was an open grassland and mammoths, horse and bison were roaming around. You would have almost a 360-degree vantage to see game coming and going. So this is a really good spot.” That’s why many different cultures made the site their home over millennia. Swan Point goes back more than 14,000 years. “It’s the oldest, well-documented age we have for any humans in Alaska,” Holmes says. “It’s older than the oldest established culture in the Lower 48, known as the Clovis culture.” He discovered the site in 1993 while working for the Office of History and Archaeology, part of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources. It was the first link between the Dyuktai culture of Siberia and Alaska. “In that period the sea level was lower and there was a land bridge, Beringia, connecting Alaska with Siberia. Alaska was actually more a part of Siberia than the Lower 48,” Holmes says. That’s because the Canadian ice shield—which existed until around 13,000 years ago — blocked the migration of animals and people between Alaska and the Lower 48. How did they make the connection between the two groups? A very special type of stone tool technology called microblade. The Dyuktai people in Siberia were using identical hunting technology during the same time period. “Think of a single-edge razor blade, long and narrow and sharp as heck on both edges,” Holmes says. About an inch long, they were made of rocks like chert, obsidian and basalt and could be used to make precise cuts like an X-Acto knife. These blades were inset into a projectile point made of ivory, bone or antler, similar to sticking razor blades into slots on a flat pencil. They were constructed as long darts and flung from an atlatl, which extended the throwing arm of the hunter like a lacrosse stick. “It would make a very wicked deadly weapon.” Yet it matches no culture in the Lower 48, suggesting the Dyuktai technology never made it down south. Where the oldest cultures in the Lower 48 came from is still hotly debated. Swan Point also holds a trove of information on wooly mammoths, helping confirm that people overlapped with the hairy elephant-like beasts. “The site is almost like an ivory workshop, where people are taking the ivory tusks and breaking them up and utilizing them.” While many ivory tools had been found in Alaska, there was no evidence that people hunted mammoths — for example, bones with an arrow tip sticking out. So some archaeologists thought that humans had simply scavenged ivory from cutbanks thousands of years later. Radiocarbon dating of ivory and teeth from Swan Point showed otherwise. “It became perfectly clear that people and mammoths were coexisting. The people were killing the animals using this microblade stone tool technology.” Now they are digging their way toward the past, uncovering different cultures as they move down through the soil sediments. This summer, the group is also investigating 800-year-old hearths discovered last season that contain stone tools as well as burned, white bone fragments. “We suspect this was a method of rendering the grease out of them, by boiling them in water and skimming off the grease.” Swan Point is important not just for its age but also for its quality — it’s intact. “A lot of sites are disturbed by construction. This site was totally undisturbed. It was found in a test pit by archaeologists.” Holmes will begin a comprehensive report on Swan Point after this season. Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community.