[Illustration: BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY FORTY-SIXTH ANNUAL REPORT
PLATE 30
ESKIMO VILLAGES AND SITES. NORTON SOUND AND BAY AND SEWARD PENINSULA,
AND THE KOTZEBUE SOUND, FROM ZAGOSKIN'S GENERAL MAP, 1847]
[Illustration: FIGURE 15.--Nelson's map. (Eighteenth Ann. Rept. Bur.
Amer. Ethn., 1898)]
Other useful publications in these connections are the United States
Coast Pilots of Alaska, the various accounts of travelers, explorers,
and men in collateral branches of science (geology, biology, etc.),
the publications of the Alaska Division of the United States Department
of Education, the annual reports of the Governor of Alaska, and the
decennial reports on Alaska of the United States Census.
[Illustration: FIGURE 16.--Linguistic map, United States census, 1920]
The object of the following notes and data is some measure of
usefulness to future anthropological and archeological workers in
Alaska. They are surely incomplete and very imperfect, yet they may be
of some service.
Archeological and anthropological research in the highly important
western Eskimo region is bound to develop in a not far distant future;
for this is the region through which in all probability America was
peopled. It is this region that promises to solve the problem of the
antiquity of the Eskimo and may throw much light upon the origin of
these people, and one that, as shown, above, has begun to reveal highly
interesting old cultural conditions. And it is a region in which
destruction of the remains by nature, but most so recently by the
natives themselves, proceeds at an alarming pace.
The information on which these notes and the accompanying charts are
based has been obtained largely from the Russian and other maps, from
local traders, teachers, missionaries, and natives, and from a few
explorers.[61] Only in a minority of cases was it possible to visit
the places in person; to have visited all would have been a task of
pleasure, but would have required a staunch boat of my own and at least
three full seasons.
Many of the sites to be given are now "dead" and there may be several
old sites in the vicinity of a living village. Others combine ruins
with present habitations. Still others are partly or even wholly
abandoned a part of the year when the inhabitants go camping or
hunting, and are partly or wholly occupied during the rest of the
year. Finally, there are some new settlements, with modern dwellings
and ways, and their number will increase, the Eskimo taking kindly to
civilization and individual property.
The data to be given here are limited to the Eskimo territory in
southwestern and western Alaska, leaving out those in Siberia where
much is uncertain. Due to the uncertainties of the Prince William Sound
region they will begin with Kodiak Island. There are also on hand,
principally due to Dr. E. P. Walker, numerous locations of old sites
and villages in the Indian parts of southern and southeastern Alaska,
but these will best be reserved for another occasion.
The Eskimo area will be roughly seen from the accompanying map
published on the basis of the enumeration by the Fourteenth United
States Census of 1920. A very great part of the territory allotted to
the Eskimo, as well as that of the Indian, is barren of any population
or its traces; the divisions represent the hunting grounds or grounds
claimed by each people, not an occupied territory. The data will be
given in south-to-north order.
Nearly all the settlements in these regions are now, and have evidently
always been, on the shores of the seas and bays, as close to the water
as safety would permit. A few villages and sites occur also, however,
on inland lakes and rivers. The favored locations have been an elevated
flat near the mouth of a fresh-water stream or the outlet of a lagoon,
a sufficiently elevated spit projecting into the sea, or an elevated
bar between the sea and an inland lake. The essentials were an elevated
flat, a supply of fresh drinking water, and a location favorable for
fishing and hunting; if there was some natural protection, so much
the better. There were no inland settlements except on the lakes and
rivers. In a few cases, as at the Kings and the Little Diomede Islands,
very difficult locations were occupied only because outweighed by other
advantages.
Caves throughout the occupied region north of the Aleutian chain are
absent, and there was therefore no cave habitation.
None of the settlements were very large, though a few were much larger
than others. They ranged from one or two family camps or houses to
villages of some hundreds of inhabitants. A large majority of the
settlements had from but two or three to approximately a dozen families.
There were two main types of dwellings, the semisubterranean sod houses
for the winter and the skin tents for summer. In some places the two
were near each other; in others the summer dwellings were in another
and at times fairly distant locality.
The "zimniki" (in Russian) or winter houses were throughout
the region of one general type. They were fair-sized circular
semisubterranean houses, made of driftwood and earth, and provided with
a semisubterranean entrance vestibule. Their remains are characterized
everywhere by a circular pit with a short straight trench depression,
the same pot-and-handle type as found along the Yukon. Rarely for the
construction of the houses, where driftwood did not suffice, recourse
was had to whale ribs and mandibles. The "letniki," or summer houses,
were constructed on the surface of wood, sod and skins, or of whale
ribs and skins, approaching on one hand the summer huts of various
continental tribes and on the other the "yurts" of the north Asiatic
peoples. The "kashims," or communal houses, were built, much as on the
Yukon, like the family dwellings, but occasionally quadrilateral and
much larger. Smaller semisubterranean storage houses of driftwood and
sod near the winter dwellings were seemingly general.
Ruins of stone dwellings, without mortar, are said to exist in places
on Norton Sound and Bay and on a lagoon near the western end of the
Seward Peninsula. The few houses on the Little Diomede are made of
loose unhewn stone slabs. The dwellings of the King Islanders are built
on the rocky slope of the island on platforms supported by poles, all
of driftwood.
There is as a rule an absence of separate refuse heaps near the
villages. The refuse apparently has been dumped about and between the
houses rather than on separate piles.
Dead villages abound. On consulting the older Russian records, however,
it is seen that nearly all were still "living" as late as the early
forties of the last century. Yet there are sites that were "dead"
already when the Russians came, and the accumulations in other cases
denotes a long occupation.
The site of a dead village, in summer, is generally marked by richer
and greener vegetation; same as on the Yukon. The site itself is
usually pitted or humped in a line forming a more or less elevated
ridge, or the pits may be disseminated without apparently much order.
And there may be irregular mound-like heaps without external traces of
any structure.
In the older sites no trace of wood is visible; in the later rotten
posts, crosspieces, parts of the covering of the house or tunnel, or
even a whole habitation may be present. In the old sites the wood is
hewn with stone axes; in the later it is sawed, and there may be nails.
Older accumulations lie occasionally beneath more recent ones, though
no interruption of continuity may be traceable. Of a superposition of
villages no trace was observable.