Walking a storm-scoured Alaska beach, archaeologist Rick Knecht knelt to pick up a wooden figurine the size of his palm.

He squinted at it and identified the piece as a doll that might have belonged to a little girl, one who had lived and died there centuries before. He handed it to Alice Bailey, who was walking beside him.

“We were the first people (the doll) had seen in 500 years,” Bailey said over the phone from the village of Quinhagak.

Quinhagak, home to about 700 Alaska Natives, sits exposed on the mouth of Kuskokwim Bay, part of the Bering Sea.

While the ferocious spinout of Typhoon Halong was floating houses and destroying much of nearby Kipnuk — and doing similar but slightly less thorough damage to Kwigillingok — the people of Quinhagak mostly escaped catastrophe.

That storm

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