I had further the good fortune to secure, through the kindness of
Reverend Baldwin, two handsome and remarkable knives from fossil
mammoth ivory. These knives were said to have been made recently by the
Eskimo of the Seward Peninsula. They are shown in Plate 28. They each
bear on the handle a nicely carved crouching animal figure. With them
are shown, somewhat more reduced, two probably ceremonial knives from
Old Mexico; and also the handle of a late palaeolithic poignard from
France, illustrated by De Quatrefages.[58] Regarding the latter form we
read the following in Mortillet:[59] "D'autres poignées de poignard,
faites dans des données pratiques et artistiques analogues, ont été
recueillies dans diverses collections. Les plus remarquables sont deux
poignées en ivoire trouvées par Peccadeau de l'Isle, à Bruniquel. L'une
se rattachait à la lame, comme dans la pièce précédente, par le train
de derrière; l'autre, au contraire, par la tête." Knives with similar
crouching animal figures on the handle are being made by the King
Islanders.
Here, evidently, is one more interesting problem for the archeologists.
The art shown by these objects, the conventionalization, and especially
the decorations, appear to show affinity on one hand to deeper eastern
Asia and on the other to those of the American northwest coast and
even lower. This may prove to mean much or little. The fact that these
specimens establish beyond question is that at one time and up to a
few hundreds of years ago there existed in the lands of the northern
Bering Sea native art superior to that existing there later and at the
present, and comparable with the best native Siberian or American.
The meaning of this fact seems to me to be of importance. The evidence
suggests, aside from other things, that American cultural developments
may after all not have been purely local or even American, but that
they may, in part at least, have been initiated or carried from Asia.
In view of these and other recent developments it seems rational to
consider that America may have been peopled by far eastern Asiatic
groups that not merely carried with them differences in language and
physique but also in some cases relatively high cultural developments.
But these for the present are mere hypotheses.
There is no definite indication as yet that the people of the high
fossil ivory art in the northern Bering Sea and neighboring parts were
any others than the ancestors of the Eskimo. The skeletal remains from
these regions, as will be shown later, rather support this view. But
those ancestors may not yet have represented the characteristic present
type of the people. Here, too, nothing definite can be said before the
results of sufficient scientific excavations become available.