de Lagruna] ARCHEOLOGY, YAKUT AT BAY AREA, ALASKA. 203 



trade goods, might appear at sites dating from the middle to the late 

 18th centm-y, and that Old Town may have been abandoned some- 

 what earlier. 



It will be remembered that scraps of iron were found only in 

 Mounds A and B (Old Town III and II), and not in what is considered 

 the oldest section of the site, Mounds C and D and House Pit 7. 

 Theoretically, there are thi-ee possible sources of such iron (de Laguna, 

 1956, pp. 61 ff.). First, it might have been obtained from Asiatic 

 sources by purely aboriginal trade via Bering Strait, where the 

 Eskimo apparently had iron points for engraving tools from one to 

 two thousand years ago. Although this som'ce may have supplied 

 the tiny scraps of metal used for incising the compass-drawn dot-and- 

 circle designs on artifacts from Kachemak Bay III, early Kodiak, and 

 early Aleutian sites, the iron found at Old Towti must be more recent, 

 for it is in larger pieces, and there is no evidence that any but the most 

 minute fragments were known in Alaska until after the middle of the 

 17th centiu-y, when the Russians had established themselves on the 

 Anadyr River in Siberia. Thus, the earliest iron knives in northern 

 Alaska do not antedate the end of that centiu-y. 



A second possibility is that iron was obtained by the Aleut and 

 Pacific Eskimo by more direct trade with Asia, perhaps as their tradi- 

 tions suggest, from Russian or Chinese voyagers who may have 

 preceded Bering in the early 18th century. 



The third, and most likely, source of iron is nails and bolts in drift- 

 wood and wreckage, which increased maritime activity during the 

 17th and 18th centuries would have made available (cf. Rickard, 

 1939). While we do not know how early the Yakutat people may 

 have obtained drift iron, it is likely to have been before they acquired 

 glass beads, since the latter could only have been obtained through 

 trade. We may, therefore, be able to distinguish an early protohis- 

 toric period with drift iron but without beads, and a later proto- 

 historic period with both drift iron and Cook type beads. This is, in 

 fact, what is suggested by the Yakutat sites, if Old Town II and III 

 represent the earlier phase and Shallow Water Town the later. 



Another clue to the relative age of Old Town is provided by the 

 occurrence of native copper. This is, as far as we know, the richest 

 Alaskan site for native copper with the possible exception of Dixthada, 

 near Tanacross, on the upper Tanana River, close to the source of the 

 metal (cf. Rainey, 1939, pp. 364-371). Copper first appears at Old 

 Town in the form of three pieces in the upper layers of Old To^vn I, 

 and steadily increases in quantity through the deposits of later periods. 



There is, of course, some uncertainty as to the age of copper working 

 in Alaska. Because it is undoubtedly old in many parts of the New 

 World — the Old Copper Culture of the Great Lakes area yields radio- 



