210 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 192 



we should not forget the strong ties between the Eskimo of Kachemak 

 Bay and Prince William Sound with the adjacent Athabaskans, as 

 well as those already cited that link the Eyak, Yakutat, and Tlingit 

 with their interior neighbors. 



When we come to the central Northwest Coast, to the Queen 

 Charlotte-Milbank Sound Aspect, to use Drucker's designation, there 

 seems to be more of a cultural boundary. If we could go back to the 

 last millennium before Christ, to the period when Locarno Beach I, 

 Marpole (Eburne), Whalen I, and perhaps other southern sites were 

 occupied, and when ancient Pacific Eskimo (cf. Kachemak Bay I) 

 and "Pre-Aleut" cultures were flourishing, we should perhaps find 

 no sharp break between the various cultures stretching from southern 

 British Columbia to southwestern Alaska. The many types common 

 to both of these areas attest linkages between them which appear to 

 have been lost in the recent intervening cultures known to us through 

 ethnography and through archeological collections of meager antiq- 

 uity. Is this because, as Borden suggests (1951, pp. 37 ff.), an old 

 cultural connection between the Wakashan (Nootka-Kwakiutl) and 

 the Eskimo has been disrupted by the intrusion onto the Northwest 

 Coast of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsunshian? While such movements 

 from interior to the coast undoubtedly have occurred and may to 

 some degree have disrupted cultural continuities, yet perhaps what 

 these Ulterior immigrants introduced may not have been as completely 

 foreign to the coast as one might suppose, if both ancient coastal and 

 interior tribes shared in a common northwestern tradition. Perhaps, 

 too, there were always some peculiarities of the northern Northwest 

 Coast (such as matrilineal social organization?), which we might call 

 "Eyak" or even "western Na-Dene," that distinguished it from the 

 central and southern regions, despite the many ancient cultural ties 

 that linked north and south. 



Among the latter, I am loath to recognize a special "Eskimoid" 

 stamp in Nootka culture. Aside from the proficiency of the Nootka 

 as seamen and aside from certain techniques and rituals associated 

 with Nootka whaling, there is little else in Nootka culture that strikes 

 us as particularly Eskimoid. Actually, in other respects, the Tlingit 

 seem more like the Eskimo, as has been apparent from our compari- 

 sons. Is it possible that Nootka whaling is really the result of the 

 perfection by a people living on the ocean of common and widely 

 diffused methods and rituals of hunting sea mammals? Can it be a 

 growth parallel to but not directly related to northern Eskimo whaling? 

 The latter was not practiced in southwestern Alaska, and was not 

 developed in Bering Sea until the Punuk culture, dating from the early 

 Christian era (despite the appearance of one harpoon head large 

 enough to capture a whale in the Okvilv-Old Bering Sea culture). 



