466 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 3 



southward migration or culture drift from St. Lawrence Island or 

 Bering Strait within the past few centuries. An earlier influence, 

 possibly dating from the Old Bering Sea period, may be reflected 

 in the bone and ivory dart foreshafts which the Eskimos of this 

 region carve to represent a sea otter or other mammal with open 

 jaws. However, it is not yet possible to speak definitely of culture 

 sequences in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region as excavations have not 

 been made there. 



Northward of Norton Sound the Punuk played a relatively unim- 

 portant role ; there the Thule, as the dominant intermediate culture, 

 provided the principal basis for the modern Eskimo culture of north- 

 ern Alaska. The sequence — Old Bering Sea-Birnirk to Thule to 

 modern — may be assumed for the region around Barrow, but the 

 place of origin of the Thule is uncertain. From the present indica- 

 tions it may have been at Bering Strait, at Barrow, or along the coast 

 between Barrow and the Mackenzie delta. We know little of the 

 archeology of the Arctic coast from Barrow eastward to the Arctic 

 Archipelago; somewhere along this broad stretch of coast there 

 should be older Thule sites than those excavated by Mathiassen in 

 the Hudson Bay region — sites established by the ancestors of the 

 Thule Eskimos as they migrated eastward from Alaska probably 

 during the period that Birnirk was inhabited. 



From the recent investigations of Jenness and Wintemburg, it 

 seems not unlikely that when the Thule Eskimos entered the Hud- 

 son Bay region they found other Eskimos — those of the Cape Dorset 

 culture — already established there.-^ The origin of the Dorset cul- 

 ture and the influence it may have exerted on later cultures are 

 problems for the future. Until this old Eastern Eskimo culture has 

 been revealed in its entirety and its origin determined, it will hardly 

 be possible to seek a solution to the ultimate problem of the origin 

 of Eskimo culture. 



Excavations in the lower Amur valley and in the territory of the 

 Kamchadal, Koryak, and Chukchee should clarify to some extent 

 the problem of the relationship between these northeastern Asiatics 

 and the Eskimo and Indian tribes of northwestern America. The 

 widely held theory that the Eskimo originated in north-central 

 Canada and that some of them later moved westward along the 

 Arctic coast to Bering Strait is not supported by recent investiga- 

 tions, for these seem to have revealed an older stage of Eskimo cul- 

 ture in Alaska than in the central or eastern regions. In the light 

 of the present evidence, the Eskimo, instead of constituting an in- 

 trusive wedge which disrupted a former continuity of culture on 



2» Jenness, D., The Problem of the Eskimo, In The American Aborigines, their Origin 

 and Antiquity, Univ. Toronto Press, pp. 373-396, 1933. 



