ARCHEOLOGY AND ECOLOGY OF ALASKA — SOLECKI 491 



people seems to have been pre-Eskimo and pre-Athapascan Indian. 

 The north-slope finds may be as much as 5,000 years old. Since the 

 cores and flakes were found on strategic hills, it indicated that these 

 stations were used by hunters who kept a long-range lookout for 

 herds of game. We are not certain whether bison, musk ox, moose, 

 or caribou was the most abundant game hunted. It could have been 

 any one of these. Today the first two of this group are extinct in 

 Alaska, and the caribou are more numerous than moose on the north 

 slope. Probably the climate had a disturbing effect on the ecologi- 

 cal habitat of the bison and moose, at least. They seem to prefer 

 different herbaceous plants than the tundra grasses upon which the 

 cold-loving caribou thrive. This would explain why the moose and 

 bison, b}^ and large, migrated to warmer fields which would be more 

 suited to the growth of plants upon which they fed. Indeed, we are 

 told that a botanist, Hugh M. Raup, of Harvard University, finds 

 that muskeg land or the tundra, prior to the presence of the grass- 

 lands, extended into the Peace River area of Alberta up to 2 or 3 

 thousand years ago. The present-day bison and moose in this region 

 were preceded by herds of caribou ( Jenness, 1940, p. 3) . Raup ( 1941, 

 pp. 225-227) has pointed out that attempts to correlate changing 

 climates and vegetations on the one hand, and the migrations of 

 aboriginal populations on the other, present some fascinating problems. 

 With the possible exception of some evidence found at Disco Bay, 

 Greenland, this core-flake cultural horizon seems to have consisted 

 primarily of inland-dwelling aborigines. 



3. The prehistoric Eskimo of the third phase considered were also 

 inland dwellers, at least for a greater part of the year. They seem 

 to have been almost entirely dependent upon caribou as their main 

 source of meat. Whether they descended the rivers regularly late in 

 spring, as did the historic Eskimo described by Stoney (1899), we 

 do not know. However, in all likelihood they did, as evidenced by 

 the presence of aboriginal trade goods found at the sites. All the 

 lithic material recovered seems to have been locally derived. 



A United States naval officer and explorer, Lt. George M. Stoney 

 (1899) , has offered us the best graphic eyewitness account of the inland 

 Arctic people, the Nunatagmiut. Larsen and Rainey (1948, pp. 30- 

 36) summarize our knowledge of the inland Eskimos from various 

 sources. One of the most pertinent remarks about the Nunatagmiut 

 made by the latter authors (ibid., p. 31) is that "above all, it is their 

 ecology which makes these inland Eskimos a unit and serves to dis- 

 tinguish them from the coast Eskimo." Outright starvation and 

 disease, particularly diseases introduced by the white man, accounted 

 for the decimation of the Nunatagmiut at the turn of the nineteenth 

 century. 



