Alaskan Archaeologists Race Against Erosion, Melting Permafrost To Save Native Graves - BBC

It is not the type of a call that an archaeologist receives every day. There are bodies, the voice on the end of the line told Anne Jensen; we don't know who they were, or why they are here. "People started noticing stuff eroding out of the bluff," she recalls, "and I got called out, along with the police, the real estate people and so on. "It was very clearly an archaeological burial. And the bluff was collapsing quickly, so we just got the contents out."

The bluff lies virtually at the end of the Americas, on a narrow, hooked spit projecting northwards from Barrow. It marks the join of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, and is prey to the temperamental vagaries of both.

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When the first bodies washed out of the sea-battered bluff a decade ago, interest was high, but funding to excavate and examine stubbornly low. That has changed; and since 2005, the researchers have received grants from Echo, a US federal programme aiming to give high school students a regular taste of real science. The students spend several weeks digging alongside researchers, which given the shortness of the digging season and the necessity of getting the bodies out fast would be described as a dawn-to-dusk job, if the north Alaskan summer had dawns or dusks rather than 24-hour sunlight.

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As the Point Barrow bluff erodes, the rescue mission will presumably continue. Bodies will be snatched from the ocean's grasp each short summer, examined and catalogued before a new internment in the safer soils of modern Barrow. Each body is a fragment of the town's past, a reminder of the long history of whale-centred culture which binds the threads of a millennium. They are treasures which neither the Barrow community nor its modern scientific boarders are minded to let wash away.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6902858.stm

There's more than one way to kill off an excess of human population.