230 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 1 10 



CRANIOLOGY OF THE ALEUTS 



Tokareva ^* studied the osteological materials from the excavations 

 of W. I. Jochelson *^ in connection with the Kamchatka Expedition of 

 the Russian Geographic Society, 1908-1910. Jochelson, who excavated 

 in the Aleutian Islands during 1909 and 1910, found 78 crania, 19 

 skeletons, and 617 bones in burial caves on the islands of Attu, Atka, 

 Umnak, Amaknakh, and Uknadakh, and in burial huts on Unimak 

 Island. Tokareva is now preparing for publication an extensive 

 monograph on this material. 



Tokareva summarizes the theories regarding the origin of the 

 Aleuts. The early explorers believed them to be immigrants from 

 Asia: Steller on the basis of some cultural elements, such as head- 

 dress; Veniaminov (1840), on Aleut traditions. Schrenk classified 

 the Aleuts as belonging to his Paleoasiatic group of peoples. 



Dall was the first of the modern investigators to express the belief 

 that the Aleuts came from America. He thought them to be of Eskimo 

 ("Innuit") origin, but did not base his conclusions on any anthro- 

 pological evidence beyond recording the extreme variability of the 

 Aleut crania, ranging from dolichocephalic to brachycephalic. Jochel- 

 son, while criticizing Ball's theories regarding Aleut prehistory, 

 shared his ideas concerning the American origin of the Aleuts. 

 According to his conception of the history of the peoples of North 

 America and Asia, the Paleoasiatic tribes of northeastern Asia (Chuk- 

 chi, Koriaks, Kamchadals) are an Americanoid branch, closely con- 

 nected culturally with the tribes of northwestern America. 



According to Jochelson all these tribes represent the remains of 

 an ancient cultural layer, the unity of which was disrupted at a definite 

 period by the intrusion of a new ethnic group, the Eskimo. Consti- 

 tuting the apex of the Eskimo wedge, which divided the autochthonous 

 population into an American and an Asiatic group, were the Aleuts. 



According to Tokareva, Jochelson did not give adequate attention 

 to the racial peculiarities of the Aleuts. Jochelson *^ pointed out the 

 existence of a series of sharp differences between the Aleut and the 

 Eskimo type (brachycephaly), and suggested that these differences 



44 Tokareva, T. lA. (State Museum of Anthropology, Moscow), Materialy po 

 kraniologii aleutov [Materials for Aleut craniology]. AZH, No. i, pp. 57-71, 



1937. 



■*5 Archaeological investigations in the Aleutian Islands. Carnegie Institution 

 of Washington, 1925 ; History, ethnology and anthropology of the Aleut. 

 Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933. 



^8 Jochelson, W. I., History, ethnology and anthropology of the Aleut. 

 Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933. 



