NO.    I  ARCHEOLOGY    OF    ST.    LAWRENCE    ISLAND COLLINS  2i47 
The  modern  St.  Lawrence  cooking  pot — Hat-bottomed,  rectangular 
in  shape  and  with  suspension  higs  or  holes  at  the  rim — is  an  entirely 
different  form,  which  makes  its  appearance  at  about  the  close  of  the 
Punuk  period.  It  is  an  unusual  and  impractical  form  for  a  pottery 
vessel  to  take,  and  since  it  is  unrelated  to  the  earlier  local  form  but 
very  close  to  some  of  the  eastern  soapstone  pots  (e.  g.,  the  rounded- 
square  Thule  type  and  the  Greenland  type  described  by  Hough,  pi.  9, 
fig.  4),  it  seems  impossible  to  avoid  the  conclusion  that  it  is  a  pottery 
imitation  of  a  soapstone  vessel,  a  view  which  has  already  been  ex- 
pressed by  Birket-Smith  (1929,  vol.  2,  p.  104)  and  Mathiassen 
(1930  a,  p.  92). 
The  relation  between  the  pottery  and  stone  cooking  pot  presents  a 
similar  problem  to  that  of  the  lamp.  Mathiassen  ( 1927,  vol.  2,  p.  105) 
thinks  that  the  rounded  pottery  form  is  the  older : 
The  round  or  oval  soapstone  cooking  pots  of  the  Thule  culture  are  presumably 
copies  of  the  rounded  form  of  the  clay  vessel  transferred  to  soapstone ;  later 
on,  the  suitable  oblong  shape  for  soapstone  (but  not  for  clay)  has  made  its 
appearance  in  the  central  regions  and  superseded  the  round  form  from  these 
regions  and  later,  through  purchase,  transplanted  itself  to  North  Alaska. 
Birket-Smith  (1929,  vol.  2,  p.  104)  agrees  that  the  oval  fonn  is  older 
than  the  rectangular  but  contends  that 
....  it  by  no  means  follows  from  this  that  the  stone  pot  has  been  derived  from 
a  clay  pot  ....  the  distribution  of  the  stone  cooking  pot  in  North  America  is 
a  powerful  argument  in  favor  of  the  earliest  cooking  pot  of  the  Eskimos  being 
of  stone. 
The  absence  of  soapstone  cooking  pots  in  the  west  is  naturally  explained  by 
the  fact  that  soapstone  ....  does  not  occur  west  of  Coronation.  Gulf.  All 
soapstone  cooking  pots  and  lamps  at  Mackenzie  River  and  in  Alaska  are  imported. 
That  they  were  nevertheless  in  regular  use  means  obviously,  as  in  the  case  of 
stone  lamps,  a  holding  on  to  old  custom. 
However,  now  that  recent  investigations  have  shown  that  the  stone 
pots  and  lamps  in  northern  Alaska  are  all  recent  importations  from 
the  east,  the  problem  appears  in  an  entirely  different  light.  We  see 
that  there  is  a  wide  break  in  the  line  of  continuity  that  Birket-Smith 
would  trace  from  the  Central  regions  to  Alaska,  thence  down  the  North 
Pacific  coast  to  California,  across  to  the  Great  Basin  and  finally  to 
the  middle  and  north  Atlantic  region.  The  presence  of  pottery  and 
the  absence  of  stone  vessels  is  no  local  peculiarity  of  the  Old  Bering 
Sea  culture.  On  the  contrary  it  is  conformable  to  conditions  in  north- 
eastern Siberia  where  pottery  was  formerly  widespread,  as  in  the 
territory  of  the  Koryak,  Kamchadal,  Chukchee,  and  Yakut,  to  say 
nothing  of  Eurasia  generally.    We   may  safely  say,   therefore,  that 
