de Laguna] ARCHEOLOGY, YAKUTAT BAY AREA, ALASKA 211 



Farther north, the people who left the "Kruenstern notched point 

 assemblage (earHer than 1500 B.C.)" were "primarily seal hunters 

 and whalers" (Giddings, 19G0, p. 127), but we are not yet told how 

 they took whales. In any event, the succeedmg Choris caribou 

 hunters (1500-500 B.C.) did no whaling, and in fact, whaling with 

 toggle harpoons did not appear until the development of Western 

 Thule culture, approximately coeval with the Punuk. Thus, there 

 are chronological and geographical difficulties in postulating a direct 

 relationship between Nootka and Eskimo whaling, especially in view 

 of the marked dissimilarities between other aspects of Northern 

 Alaskan Eskimo and Nootka cultures. This is, however, a problem 

 which cannot be solved without systematic excavation at Nootka 

 and at more northern Northwest Coast sites. 



In appraising cultural similarities and dissimilarities, or in specu- 

 lating upon the direction of diffusion, we are bound to be somewhat 

 subjective in our judgment because we cannot help using those cul- 

 tures with which we are most familiar as standards against which 

 others are to be measured. Thus, the northern Alaskan Eskimo are 

 assumed, perhaps unconsciously, to constitute a norm of the typical 

 Alaskan Eskimo from which the less familiar Pacific Eskimo appear 

 divergent, or as intermediate between the "true Eskimo" and the 

 Aleut. The strilcing and vigorous cultures of the Northwest Coast 

 are better Imown to us than those of the Yakutat, Eyak, and 

 Chugach, or at least we feel that they are better known, and so we un- 

 consciously assume that they are more developed. Thus, when we 

 find similarities among these groups, we are inclined to explain them 

 as the result of Tlingit influences, for it was among the Tlingit or 

 other Northwest Coast tribes that we fu-st encountered these traits. 

 Had we, for example, come first to the Koniag and Chugach in the 

 days of their cultural vigor and had derived our knowledge of the 

 Tlingit only when their aboriginal culture was already faded, what 

 would have been our natural impressions of these peoples? 



We really know little about Yakutat, Eyak, and Pacific Eskimo 

 art, and almost nothing of their aboriginal social and ceremonial hfe, 

 whereas it is these aspects of Northwest Coast culture that have most 

 strongly struck our imagination. Instead of assuming that the ani- 

 mal art style, for example, originated in the south and diffused north- 

 westward across the Gulf of Alaska, should we not keep an open mind 

 and ask whether those examples of "Northwest Coast art style" 

 represented by carved and painted wooden objects or painted basketry 

 hats from the Yakutat, Eyak, Chugach, and Koniag, may not equally 

 weU represent the survival of an artistic tradition common to the 

 cultures of southwestern Alaska, the Gulf of Alaska, and the North- 

 west Coast, and admit that we do not as yet know the place of origin 



