Kodiak’s first residents arrived at least 7,800 years ago, colonizing an environment warmer and drier than today. Archaeologists believe these people came from southwestern Alaska and were well-adapted to life along the coast. Like their descendants, they used barbed harpoons, chipped stone points, and ground slate lances to hunt sea mammals, delicate bone hooks to jig for cod, and large bone picks to dig for clams. Early residents probably lived in both skin-covered tents and oval, single-roomed houses with sod block walls.

About 4,000 years ago, Kodiak people began to focus more intensely on fishing, harvesting quantities of both cod and salmon. They developed nets to harvest large quantities of salmon, and slate ulus and smokehouses to process the catch for storage. Over time, the island’s population grew and filled up the landscape. By the end of the Kachemak tradition, people were trading for large quantities of raw materials from the Alaskan mainland. Antler, ivory, coal, and exotic stones were manufactured into tools and jewelry. Labrets, decorative plugs inserted in the face, became popular at this time, perhaps to signal the social ties of the person wearing the labret in a landscape where there was increasing competition for resources. The first signs of warfare appear in the Late Kachemak.

About 800 years ago, fishing grew even more important as people harvested even greater quantities of salmon to feed their families and trade with neighbors. Related families began living together in large, multiple-roomed sod houses pooling resources and labor. Chiefs emerged, perhaps to organize labor. They led war and trading parties and hosted elaborate winter ceremonies to display their wealth and power, honor ancestors, and ensure future prosperity.

This way of living persisted until the final decades of the 1700s, when the arrival of Russian traders swept the Alutiiq into the global economy and irreversibly changed the culture.