BERING SEA AECTTEOLOGY — COLLINS 463 



bearing Piimik ornamentation, which seems to indicate the direct 

 migration of a small group of Eskimos from around Bering Strait, 

 bringing typical Punuk culture to a region where it had not existed 

 previously. 



Old Bering Sea art seems not to have played a very important role 

 around Barrow; however, a feAv examples were found in old burial 

 mounds contemporaneous with the Birnirk settlement. 



The exact relationship between the several north Alaskan culture 

 stages and the Thule culture of Canada is still somewhat uncertain. 

 Harpoon heads, art, and a number of implement types link the oldest 

 of the Barrow sites — Birnirk — with the Old Bering Sea culture. 

 There are also resemblances to the Thule culture, but these are found 

 for the most part in simple traits of wide distribution, most of which 

 are also common to the Old Bering Sea culture. When we come to 

 consider the protohistoric and modern sites on tlie Arctic coast the 

 situation is entirely different. Here the resemblances to the Thule 

 culture are numerous and striking. Such important Thule elements 

 as soapstone lamps, pictographic art, small ivory bird figures, drilled 

 lashing holes on harpoon heads, and objects connected with dog 

 traction (flat bone sled shoes, trace buckles, also swivels and ferrules) 

 are common at the modern or late prehistoric Alaskan sites, but have 

 not been found at any of the older sites either at Barrow, around 

 Bering Strait, or on St. Lawrence Island. 



The hypothesis that would seem best to explain this situation 

 would be that such elements as those last mentioned were brought to 

 northern Alaska within the past few centuries by a return or west- 

 ward migration of Thule peoples subsequent to the original eastward 

 spread of the Thule culture. There is reason for believing that the 

 Point Barrow house should also be included among the elements thus 

 introduced, for although built of different materials, it resembles the 

 Thule house and the related Polar Eskimo house of northwestern 

 Greenland in platform arrangement and to a certain extent in roof 

 structure ; whereas it is in these very features — and also in wall con- 

 struction — that the Point Barrow house differs from other Alaskan 

 houses, both on the Arctic coast and below Norton Sound. 



Language seems to afford further evidence in the same direction. 



* * * tlie dialects of the Siberian coast and of the Yukon and Kiiskok- 

 wim deltas [diverge] more widely from those spoken north of Norton Sound 

 than the latter from the dialects of far-distant Greenland and Labrador." 



* * * it is a remarkable fact that a Greonlander can still travel from his 

 own country right across Arctic America as far as Bering Strait and make his 

 dialect understood everywhere with little difficulty • * * south of Bering 

 Strait, however, with the exception of a few oases like Inglestat, at the head 

 of Norton Bay, where the dialect differs hut little from that of Barrow, the 



"Jonness. D., Ethnological Problems of Arctic America, Amer. Gcogr. Soc. Special 

 Publ. no. 7, p. 174. 1928. 



