172 POLAR PROBLEMS 



Camping places, indicated by circles of stones that have held down 

 the margins of the tents, should be carefully distinguished from 

 permanent houses; the former yield little or nothing to the inves- 

 tigator, the latter are frequently prolific in remains. 



Seat of the First Eskimo Culture 



The elucidation of the three cultures mentioned above is by 

 no means the only result that we may hope from archeological work 

 in the Arctic. Somewhere or other there must surely be an earlier, 

 more primitive culture than any of them, for we can hardly believe 

 that they sprang, full-grown, as it were, from the minds of the first 

 people who adopted the hunting of seals, whales, and walruses for a 

 livelihood. We do not know, indeed, in what region the Eskimos 

 first settled on the coast and abandoned the interior life preserved, 

 up to the end of the last century, by some tribes in the basin of the 

 Colville River in northern Alaska and still maintained by the Caribou 

 Eskimos inland from Hudson Bay. Steensby, it is true, has con- 

 jectured that their earliest seaboard settlements lay somewhere 

 between Coronation Gulf and the magnetic pole ; but the archeology 

 of this region, so far as we know it today, fails to support his theory. 

 Their first littoral home may well have been in Alaska or even on the 

 Siberian shore; or they may have occupied more than one stretch of 

 coast line simultaneously and developed different cultures that later 

 coalesced. This is pure theory. Nevertheless, somewhere along 

 the shores of the Arctic, we may be sure, the primitive littoral culture 

 of some " pro to-Eskimo " tribe awaits discovery. 



Migrations in the Bering Strait Region 



In Alaska even richer prospects are open to future archeologists. 

 If America was peopled from Asia about the close of the Ice Age, 

 as most ethnologists believe, and the immigrants came across Bering 

 Strait from East Cape to Cape Prince of Wales, some traces of their 

 passage should be discernible in this region. East Cape itself, and 

 the Diomede Islands that lie like stepping-stones in the middle of 

 the strait, consist largely of broken-down masses of granitic rock 

 and are therefore less promising hunting grounds than the mainland 

 of Alaska. Geological and geographical considerations favor a 

 search in the delta and valley of the Yukon River, for not only is 

 this the only highway into the interior of the continent, but the- 

 climate offers fewer obstacles to archeological work than either 

 Bering Strait or the coast line farther north. Migrations from Asia, 

 it may be objected, must have ceased so long ago that the discovery 

 of their traces hinges on chance rather than on systematic search. 

 Even if this be true, there is still another possibility. The resemblances 



