2 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Boll. 192 



southeastern Alaska were probably made via Yakutat Bay, the only 

 secure shelter for boats on the whole GuK of Alaska from Controller 

 Bay to Cross Sound. (Map 1.) 



From an ethnological point of view, the Yakutat Tlingit are the 

 most marginal participants of northern Northwest Coast culture, 

 except for the even more remote Eyak of the Copper River Delta and 

 the Inland Tlingit. Unlike the latter (McClellan, 1953), who must 

 struggle to adapt coastal sophistication to an inhospitable interior 

 environment, the Yakutat occupy a region with an aboriginal reputa- 

 tion for abundant food resources and with a strategic situation for 

 trade. From the Atna of the Copper River and the Tutchone of the 

 Alsek River, the Yakutat people formerly obtained copper, furs, and 

 tanned skins, which they exchanged for dentaUa, slaves, Haida 

 canoes, and Tsimshian carvings. At a later period they acted as 

 middlemen in handling goods from the Russian posts at Nuchek in 

 Prince William Sound and at Sitka, as well as wares procured from fur 

 traders and the Hudson's Bay Company, and even traveled to Kodiak 

 and to Victoria. These widespread intertribal contacts suggest that 

 the Yakutat possessed more than a backward version of Northwest 

 Coast culture, even though many peculiarities of idiom and custom 

 which distinguish the Yakutat from the better known, typical, Tlingit 

 of southeastern Alaska may well represent archaisms. 



The Yakutat are now greatly acculturated, but until about 1884, 

 when the first store was established among them, they had been 

 largely isolated from intensive contacts with White men, except during 

 the period of Russian occupation, 1795 to 1805. Within the memory 

 of the old people, therefore, the Indians were living much as they had a 

 century before, when first visited by Europeans. The Yakutat are a 

 very friendly people and gave us a large body of ethnographic data 

 which will form the basis for a separate monograph. 



A number of sites near Yakutat gave promise of revealing early 

 historic and late prehistoric phases of the culture, although no very 

 ancient remains were found. The present report deals largely with 

 the archeology of a late prehistoric or early protohistoric village site, 

 "Old Town," on Knight Island in Yakutat Bay. Native traditions 

 give semilegendary histories of the founding and abandonment of a 

 number of settlements which we explored. 



Although the Yakutat are now TUngit, the earlier inhabitants of 

 the area spoke Eyak, and many of the local place names are in that 

 language. It is apparently a branch of the Na-Dene stock, but its 

 exact relationship to Tlingit, Haida, and Athabaskan must remain 

 uncertain until Dr. Li has finished his linguistic analysis. According 

 to Radio V (1859), there was a Copper River and a Yakutat dialect 

 of Eyak. UntU some time in the 18th century, Eyak was spoken from 



