434 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 



the Nunatagmiut. At the same time one may question the reality 

 of the proposed dichotomy in Eskimo culture, the dissociation of 

 Ipiutak and Old Bering Sea, the view that Ipiutak is a transplanted 

 Asiatic culture, and the assumption that Ipiutak, strongly influenced 

 as it was by late bronze- and iron-age cultures of Eurasia, was older 

 than and ancestral to all other known forms of Eskimo culture. 



South Alaska. — When discovered by the Russians in the eighteenth 

 century, south Alaska was one of the most densely populated sections 

 of aboriginal North America. The Aleuts on the Aleutian Islands 

 are estimated to have numbered between 15,000 and 25,000 and the 

 Kodiak and Prince William Sound Eskimos about 10,000. The large 

 number of old village sites in this area, especially in the Aleutians 

 and on Kodiak, shows that the prehistoric population was equally 

 great. 



As the territory of these southernmost Eskimos and their linguistic 

 relatives, the Aleuts, lay close to that of the Northwest Coast and 

 interior Indians, they have, as might be expected, absorbed some ele- 

 ments of Indian culture. Their physical type, too, has been modified 

 by Indian contact. However, the archeological evidence indicates 

 that it is the modern culture of these regions that has been most 

 strongly affected by such contact. The oldest stage of Kachemak 

 Bay culture in Cook Inlet is definitely more Eskimolike than the 

 later stages (de Laguna, 1934), and this seems to have been true also 

 of Kodiak and the Aleutian Islands. We know from the hundreds 

 of skeletons excavated by Hrdlicka and Laughlin that the earliest 

 inhabitants of Kodiak and the Aleutians were much closer in physical 

 type to the Bering Sea Eskimo than are the modern Aleut and 

 Koniagmiut (Hrdlicka, 1944, 1945; Collins, 1945; Laughlin, 1950). 



The relationship between the prehistoric cultures of south Alaska 

 and Bering Strait is not yet clear. The south Alaskan culture as a 

 whole can be described as generalized Eskimo, possessing many basic 

 Eskimo features as well as others unknown in the north. Punuk 

 art motifs occur in the late prehistoric deposits both at Cook Inlet 

 and the Aleutians; and objects found in the lower levels of the Aleu- 

 tian middens (pi. 1, g-i) are decorated in a style that suggests both 

 Dorset and the earliest phase of Old Bering Sea art (Quimby, 1945; 

 Collins, 1940). Also, certain types of harpoon heads, arrowheads, 

 stone blades, and other objects indicate a relationship between the 

 prehistoric Aleutian and Ipiutak cultures. The evidence at our dis- 

 posal, both cultural and physical, indicates that south Alaska was 

 a center of vigorous culture development around 2,000 years ago, that 

 the basis of the culture established there was Eskimoan and that its 

 carriers left the Bering Strait region before the Old Bering Sea and 

 Ipiutak cultures were fully formed. 



