THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF THE ESKIMO — COLLINS 431 



Strait, and sporadic traces occur in Arctic Alaska. Until recently 

 adequate information was not available for northeastern Siberia, 

 though scattered finds of Old Bering Sea and Punuk art and imple- 

 ments suggested that the two cultures may have occurred there in 

 greater concentration than in Alaska. Proof of this seems to have 

 been provided by two recent Kussian publications. Matchinski ( 1941) 

 has described two archeological collections from the Chukchee Penin- 

 sula containing a number of Old Bering Sea and Punuk objects, and 

 Rudenko (1947) describes a large body of similar material from 12 

 village sites on the east and south coasts of the Peninsula. According 

 to all indications, it is in northeastern Siberia, somewhere between the 

 mouths of the Anadyr and Kolyma Rivers that we must look for the 

 immediate origin of the Old Bering Sea culture. 



Ipiutak. — The most remarkable and most puzzling of all prehistoric 

 Eskimo cultures is the Ipiutak, discovered at Point Hope on the Arctic 

 coast of Alaska in 1939 by Rainey, Larsen, and Giddings (Larsen 

 and Rainey, 1948). The Ipiutak culture proper lacked such typical 

 Eskimo features as pottery, lamps, sleds, and rubbed-slate imple- 

 ments, and possessed a wealth of curious ivory carvings and numerous 

 other features unknown to other Eskimos. A single iron-pointed 

 engraving tool showed that the Ipiutak people had knowledge of 

 metal. A closely related phase, the Near Ipiutak, differed in that 

 it possessed whaling harpoon heads, stone lamps, and possibly pottery 

 and rubbed-slate implements. Typical of both phases were small, 

 finely chipped stone blades as well as antler and ivory arrowheads 

 and lances with rows of stone side blades which were similar to types 

 from early Neolithic sites in Siberia. The significance of tliis will 

 be discussed later. 



Thus far the Ipiutak culture proper is known only from the type 

 locality, a huge site of almost 600 houses on the gravel spit at 

 Point Hope. Larsen and Rainey believe, nevertheless, that the 

 Ipiutak Eskimos were essentially an inland rather than coastal people. 

 The Point Hope site, they believe, was occupied only in summer, when 

 the people came down to the coast to hunt sea mammals. They spent 

 the winter in the interior hunting caribou, like the modern Nuna- 

 tagmiut, their supposed descendants. It is indeed difficult to see 

 how so large a settlement could have been occupied throughout the 

 year because of the enormous quantities of driftwood that would have 

 been required for fuel, as the Ipiutak people did not use blubber lamps. 

 Thus far, however, no trace of Ipiutak has been found in the interior, 

 despite the fact that Solecki (1950) and others have found over 

 300 inland sites, many of them along the headwaters of the Colville 

 and on the Utukok, Kokolik, Kugurok, and Kukpowruk, streams not 

 far inland from Point Hope and along which theoretically the Ipiutak 

 people should have lived for many years. A few of these sites are 



