So ends the Yukon and its immediate vicinity. What has been learned?
1. The great and easily navigable river, extending for many hundreds of
miles from west to east, could not but have played a material part in
the peopling of Alaska, and quite probably in that of the continent,
and all human movements along it must have left some material remains.
It seems, therefore, a justified inference that the valley of the Yukon
harbors human remains of much scientific value.
2. Such remains, judging from the present conditions, were left
exclusively along the banks of the river, on the flood-safe elevated
platforms of the banks, and especially about the mouths of the
tributaries of the Yukon of those times.
3. But the banks and mouths of the past are seldom, if ever, those
of to-day. The river, with its currents, storms, and ice pack every
spring, is changing from year to year. It is ever cutting and eroding
in places, and building bars and islands or covering with flood silts
in others. In many stretches no one can be sure where the banks were
500 or 1,000 years ago, not to speak of earlier periods.
4. The banks and islands of to-day, therefore, are for the most part
recent formations, in which it would be useless to expect anything very
ancient. And there is nothing like the successive ocean beaches at Nome
and elsewhere, which would guide exploration.
5. The right hilly side of the river alone seems to offer some hope of
locating some more ancient sites and remains; yet it is quite certain
that the river ran once far to the left, for all the vast flats on that
side are of its construction; so that the more ancient remains of man
may lie in that direction. But there everything is, from the point of
view of archeology, a practically unexplorable jungle and wilderness,
and there is no one there who might make accidental discoveries.
6. It would seem that the best hope for the archeologist along the
Yukon, so far as the more ancient remains are concerned, lies along the
tributaries of the stream, and that particularly at the old limits of
the more recently made lands.
7. Nevertheless the banks of the Yukon as they are now are not wholly
barren. Up from Tanana, at the Old Station, probably about Ruby and
Nulato, about Kaltag and the Greyling River, at Bonasila, Holy Cross
and Ghost Creek, and at the Mountain village, Dog village, Russian
Mission, and doubtless a number of other sites, they contain both
cultural and skeletal remains that, if recovered, will be invaluable to
the anthropological history of these regions.
8. The line of demarcation between the Indians of the Yukon and the
Eskimo, outside of language, is indefinite. Traces of old Eskimo
admixture are perceptible among the Indians far up the river, and the
cultures of the two peoples in many respects merge into each other;
while among the Eskimo of the lower river and farther on there are
physiognomies that it would be hard to separate from the Indian.
Whether all this means simply extensive past mixture, or whether, as
would seem, the Alaska Indians as a whole are nearer physically to the
Eskimo than are the tribes in the States, remains to be determined.
Among the Athapascan Mescalero Apache, who have reached as far south as
New Mexico, a somewhat Eskimoid tinge to the face, especially in young
women, was by no means very unusual 25 years ago when I studied this
tribe. This problem will be touched upon again in this volume.
9. All along the Yukon, from near Tanana (Old Station) to the mouth
of the river, in the Indian and in the Eskimo region, there prevailed
the same type of winter house, namely, a largely subterranean room
with a subterranean tunnel or corridor entrance; and also a similar
type of summer dwelling, formerly a skin, now a canvas, tent. The
winter dwellings were built within of stout posts and covered with
birch bark and sod, looking from outside much like the present-day
Navaho hogan; while the pits left by them remind one of the
southwestern "pit dwellings," the kashims of the Pueblo kivas. As a
hogan, so these largely subterranean dwellings along the Yukon had a
smoke-air-and-light hole in the center of the top, a fireplace in the
middle of the floor, and benches (of heavy hewn planks in the north)
along the sides. Each village, furthermore, had at least one larger
structure of similar nature, the "kashim," or communal house. All this
may still be traced more or less plainly on the dead sites along the
Yukon, and houses as well as a kashim of this type were seen at Kotlik
and Pastolik, at the mouth of the river.
10. The native industry of the river presents also much similarity,
though there are differences.
Pottery, of much the same type and decoration, was made at least as far
as the lower middle Yukon.
Stone implements were made and used all along the river, and were much
alike. But the double-grooved, cupid-bow ax of the Yukon Indian, hafted
in the center and used for chipping rather than cutting, is lower down
replaced by the same ax, in which one end has been broken off (or
has not been finished), and which is hafted as an adze; or by oblong
quadrilateral flat axes which have not been found up the river.
The peculiar and apparently very primitive stone industry of Bonasila
is, it seems, just a development of local conditions--nature of most
available stone, and essentially hunting habit of the people that
resulted in many skins which called for numerous scrapers. Nevertheless
the site deserves a thorough further exploration.
There was apparently not much basketry along the river, the place of
the baskets being taken by the birch-bark dishes of the Indian and the
kantág or ingeniously made wooden dish of the Eskimo part of the river.
Canoes among the Yukon Indians were mainly of birch bark, while the
Eskimo had mainly skin canoes.
11. Neither the Indians nor the Eskimo of the Yukon practiced
deformation of the head or of any other part of the body, or dental
mutilation. The Indians as well as the Eskimo occasionally pierced the
septum of the nose, for nose pieces, while the Eskimo cut on each side
a slit in the lower lip for the introduction of labrets. The Eskimo cut
their hair short in a characteristic way, reminding strongly of certain
monks; the Indians left their hair long. But at Anvik the Indians both
cut their hair and wore labrets. They also used the wooden dish.
12. From all the preceding it appears that there must have been long
and intensive contacts between the Yukon Eskimo and Indians; that,
through war or in peace, they became mutually admixed; and that there
were mutual cultural transmissions.
13. No further light for the present could be gained on the origin,
antiquity, or early migrations of the Yukon Indian. It was determined,
however, that he represents but one main physical type, and that this
type is the same as that of the Indians of the Tanana and most other
Alaskan Indians of the present time.
14. Exceptional skeletal remains were washed out from the bank at
Bonasila. They are of Indians (?), but appear to be not those of the
Yukon Indian of to-day. They present a problem which is to be solved by
further exploration of the site.
15. The Eskimo of the lower parts of the river are in general better
preserved and more coherent than the Indians. They are more tractable
people and are taking more readily to work and civilization.
16. These Eskimo show, in the majority of cases, fairly typical Eskimo
physiognomies. But their heads are not as those of the northern and
eastern members of the race. The head is less narrow, less high, and
has but now and then a suggestion of the scaphoid form that is so
characteristic of the Greenland, Labrador, or northern Eskimo cranium;
also, the angles of the jaws are less bulging and the lower jaws
themselves do not appear so heavy.
17. The Yukon Eskimo burials are in all essentials much like those
of the Indians up the river. Here again a cultural connection is
very evident, in this case there having in all probability been an
adaptation of methods by the Eskimo from the Indians.
18. Archeological prospects along the delta flats occupied by the
Eskimo appear very limited.