SMITHSONIAN EXPLORATIONS, I93I IO/ 



Working with stone tools, these prehistoric Eskimo artists carved 

 from hone and walrus ivory their many and ingenious forms of imple- 

 ments, weapons, and ornaments. Some of their productions, such as 

 animal figures and human heads, are very good examples of carving 

 in the round, but the art that is most typical of the period consists of 

 a graceful arrangement of curving, flowing lines deftly incised on 

 nory surfaces. The essential motives around which the designs center 

 are circular or elliptical figures, made free hand and usually slightly 

 raised so as to suggest the eyes of an animal ; lightly incised lines, 

 some of them dotted, along with more deeply cut lines for contrast, 

 serve to balance and unify the designs. The beauty of the Old Bering 

 Sea pieces thus decorated is accentuated by the soft rich shades of 

 cream, brown, and even black which the ivory has assumed through 

 centuries of burial in the frozen soil. 



After having flourished for centuries in northern Alaska and Si- 

 beria there came a time, probably more than a thousand years ago, 

 when certain aspects of the Old Bering Sea culture, particularly its 

 art, underwent rather sudden change. Instead of the skillfully ex- 

 ecuted curvilinear designs, the lines became deeper, straighter, and 

 more evenly incised, resulting in a style which while still graceful, was 

 distinctly inferior to that which had preceded it. This style of art has 

 been designated as Punuk, from the small island 4 miles off the 

 eastern end of St. Lawrence, where in 1928 it was first found in iso- 

 lation. 2 At Gambell, Punuk art appears for the first time in the upper 

 levels of the second oldest site and overlies material of Old Bering 

 Sea type. In two other sites nearby it occurs exclusively, and at a 

 third site, very recent as shown by the presence of iron, glass beads, 

 and modern types of implements, it is scantily represented. There 

 is now a sufficient body of material from the old sites on St. Lawrence 

 to show that the simplified Punuk art was mainly an outgrowth of the 

 curvilinear art of the Old Bering Sea period, even though at first 

 glance the two styles appear hardly related. 



While it is often a fruitless procedure to speculate on the causes 

 which may have brought about cultural changes in the remote past, 

 there is some evidence that a contributing factor toward the decline of 

 the rich Old Bering Sea art was the introduction of iron tools from 

 the Orient some hundreds of years before the arrival of the Russians 

 into northeastern Siberia in the seventeenth century. Authentic Chi- 

 nese records are known which show that iron was being used in north- 



2 Prehistoric art of the Alaskan Eskimo. Smithsonian Misc. Coll., vol. 81, 

 no. 14, 1929. 



