d€ Laguna] ARCHEOLOGY, YAKUTAT BAY AREA, ALASKA 73 



COMPARISONS 



The large Yakutat multifamily houses, described by our informants 

 and apparently represented by House Pits 1 and 7, were very similar 

 to the ordinary Tlingit lineage houses of southeastern Alaska (Krause 

 1956, eh. 4; Niblack, 1890, pp. 305 f., pi. xxxv, figs. 174-176, 178; 

 Drucker, 1950, pp. 178 f.), even though the Yakutat house differed 

 in some details of construction. Thus, it was always (?) in a pit, not 

 at ground level ; there was a single bench around the walls, not a series 

 of steplike benches; there was no grooved frame to hold the bottom 

 of the wall planks; there was almost never any external decoration. 

 The southeastern Alaskan Tlingit house would, however, appear to be 

 the model copied at Yakutat. 



In many respects the larger multifamily dwelling houses of the 

 Copper River Delta Eyak were similar (Birket-Smith and de Laguna, 

 1938, pp. 32^3). Thus, they had vertical wall planks, central 

 fireplace and smoke hole with movable screen, plank floor, boxlike 

 sleeping rooms, etc. However, like many Tlingit and Kwakiutl 

 houses, and like the standard houses of the Haida and Tsimshian, the 

 wall planks of Eyak houses were fitted into a grooved frame at the 

 bottom. Furthermore, Eyak houses were not apparently erected in or 

 around a pit. It is not clear whether the Eyak "potlatch house," 

 of which there were said to have been two in each village, are to be 

 considered as an older form of festival and guesthouse that had been 

 supplanted on the Northwest Coast when the lineage house became 

 large enough for such functions, or whether (more likely) these Eyak 

 "potlatch houses" were simply the residences of chiefs (Birket-Smith 

 and de Laguna, 1938, p. 374). Despite inconsistencies in our data, 

 we gather that these so-called "potlatch houses" were like lineage 

 houses in a number of features. They might have totem poles at 

 the front, walls of double height (probably like the Yakutat house 

 with two tiers of wall planks at the gable ends), and totemic paintings 

 on the fronts of lockers imder the bench, especially those at the rear. 

 These "lockers" may actually have been sleeping rooms, and the deco- 

 rations seem to be the equivalent of the painted rear screen in Tlingit 

 and Yakutat houses. However, no interior carved posts were 

 mentioned. 



The feature which most clearly distinguishes the larger Eyak house 

 from Yakutat and Tlingit houses of comparable size is that all Eyak 

 houses had only the single ridgepole. In this respect, they resembled 

 the smaller Yakutat houses, described by our informants and sug- 

 gested by House 8 and House 9. Since the single ridgepole becomes 

 far more common than the twin ridgepoles on both the northern and 

 southern peripheries of the Northwest Coast and even beyond, it has 



