86 Alaskan Science Conference 



Bering Strait as an early doorway out of Asia in so far as a 

 general theory is concerned, while at the same time many of 

 them wish to see in the archaeological facts of the far north only 

 a pattern, or ideal, called "Eskimo." 



Perhaps this concentration on either the distant past or the 

 present, with no discernible middle period, is traceable to the 

 rather distinct and separate origins of studies of American 

 Indian prehistory and of "early man." The one study, directed 

 towards such continuities as from existing Pueblo tribes back 

 through the cliff house periods to the Basket-makers, has a local 

 American tradition. Its basic concepts and terminology, what- 

 ever the area, can be traced from such mound-searchers as 

 Thomas Jefferson, Caleb Atwater, and Squier and Davis, and 

 geologists such as John Wesley Powell, on to the Boasian school 

 of ethnographic detailers, and to historical stratifiers of eth- 

 nography such as Kaj Birket-Smith. Students of Early Man, 

 on the other hand, whether Abbott or Roberts, have been 

 flint-consciously oriented, in this aspect of their work, towards 

 western Europe and to earth-ordering like that of de Mortillet. 

 Their frame of cross-reference has lain horizontally in time 

 when it has concerned Folsom and related discoveries, so that 

 comparisons of like materials have tended to reach across wide 

 areas. Thus, one may discuss flints from Clovis in New Mexico, 

 Dent in Colorado, and Scottsbluff in Nebraska as though they 

 were a result of the one set of natural agents that has controlled 

 the earth sediments in which they occurred. The same investi- 

 gators have not dealt in such broad areas when defining house 

 pits and villages, however. The latter kind of site has been 

 referred locally upward and downward in time, in a conscious 

 effort to establish the regional and environmental ties demon- 

 strated by living peoples. The emergence of Early Man as a 

 scientifically proven reality after 1927 exaggerated the cleavage 

 between the traditions. 



More recently, a few "cultural" archaeologists have been 

 reaching back determinedly for the linkage to geologically- 

 treated "complexes" of flints and bone fragments. Radioactive 

 carbon dating now threatens to erase the barriers between the 



