Preservation of Archaeological Sites— de Laguna 57 



The accelerated rate with which the aboriginal native cultures 

 are being transformed before our eyes makes the preservation 

 of ethnographic and linguistic material a problem to be solved 

 within the next ten— no, five— years, or to many tribes and com- 

 munities the ethnographer will come too late, for the knowledge 

 of ceremonial ways no longer practiced, of songs and stories no 

 longer repeated, of beliefs and attitudes no longer honored, will 

 die with a few old men and women, now in their seventies and 

 eighties. The need for salvaging this information is most acute 

 in those communities where the old socio-economic order has 

 been disrupted by the introduction of the white man's money 

 economy (by commercial fishing or by construction projects), 

 where demoralization has resulted from the presence of military 

 establishments, or where school and church have been successful 

 in educating and reorienting the natives towards the new world. 



These critical areas embrace all of southeastern Alaska, which 

 includes the northern outposts of Haida and Tsimshian, all of 

 the Tlingit peoples, and the few surviving Eyak. Dr. Garfield 

 has outlined the situation here and has stressed the need for 

 coordinated and integrated studies. On the basis of my own 

 more limited experience in this area, I can only urge the im- 

 portance of research which will take account of local differences 

 among the heterogeneous Tlingit, and would place a high pri- 

 ority on studies of Eyak linguistics and social organization. 



The second area includes the Eskimos of Prince William 

 Sound and Kenai Peninsula, the Athabaskans of Cook Inlet, 

 the Eskimos of Kodiak Island and the Aleut. The informants 

 among the first-mentioned mainland groups who contributed 

 to the pioneer ethnographic studies made fifteen to twenty years 

 ago are dead and we do not know what opportunities are still 

 left for research, although many important questions remain 

 unanswered. Dr. Laughlin reports a still fertile field in Kodiak. 

 He has for some time been conducting coordinated researches 

 in Aleut ethnology, linguistics, physical anthropology and ar- 

 chaeology. Here the most critical community is Atka, where 

 deculteration is affecting not only the local natives but the Attu 



