ARCHEOLOGY OF THE BERING SEA REGION^ 



By Henry B. Collins, Jk. 

 Assistant Curator, Division of Ethnology, U.S. National Museum 



[With 11 plates] 



There is probably no spot on the Western Hemisphere that holds 

 a more prominent place in anthropological theory than Bering Strait, 

 the narrow body of water just below the Arctic Circle which barely 

 separates the great land masses of Asia and America; for, according 

 to every indication, this was the gateway through wdiich man first 

 entered the American continent. As yet the theory is based on 

 indirect evidence, by the fact that (1) in physical type the American 

 aborigines are mainly Mongoloid and, in the absence of any evidence 

 that the type originated in America, must therefore be presumed to 

 have spread from eastern Asia, and (2) because Bering Strait is 

 the only place where under existing conditions such an entry could 

 have been easily effected. No human remains or artifacts of any 

 great antiquity have been found around Bering Strait, and local con- 

 ditions are such that their discovery seems far from likely. If man 

 migrated into America during Pleistocene time, any remains left 

 behind in the far North would be difficult to find, as they would now 

 lie buried beneath the accumulations of frozen muck and ground ice 

 which cover the Pleistocene gravels on the Alaskan mainland around 

 Bering Strait. It may be regarded as significant that although the 

 bones of mammoth, bison, horses, and other Pleistocene mammals 

 have been found in abundance during mining operations or through 

 the erosion of fossil-bearing deposits, there has been as yet no 

 reported find of a human bone or authentic artifact of similar age. 

 If, on the other hand, man entered America in postglacial times 

 and migrated along the coasts or penetrated into the interior along 

 existing water courses, the tracing of such, passage would be equally 

 difficult, for considerable topographic changes have taken place in 

 the coast lines even in recent years, and the river banks are being 

 washed away and rebuilt at a rapid rate. From the nature of the 

 circumstances, therefore, it would appear that the discovery in Alaska 



^ Paper presented before Fifth I'aciflc Science ConRress, Vancouver, B.C., June 1933, 

 revised. 



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