34 BUREAU 'OF AMERICAN ETIIlSrOLOGY [bull. 60 



ported b}' the wandering priests was America. It is well known that 

 Japanese junks have been found floating in the near Pacific or 

 stranded on the American shores, but this also has little bearing on 

 the question of the peopling of America, since this continent was 

 probably inhabited long before the Japanese junk became a sea- 

 going vessel. 



We now approach the route afforded by the festoon of islands 



draped like a wreath in the Pacific between Kam- 

 Aieutian-com- chatka and Alaska. To-day with the boats of the 

 Route primitive natives of both coasts this is a possible 



route, but the voyage has one great interval of 300 

 miles of open and generally tempestuous sea. It is not, there- 

 fore, a probable route for very primitive times. Examinations 

 of the ancient midden heaps and other inhabited sites of the 

 Aleutian Islands give no encouragement to the idea that this 

 was ever a thoroughfare for migrating populations. Dr. Ball's 

 careful explorations ^ indicate that three periods of Aleutian occu- 

 pancy may be distinguished, estimated to embrace in all some 3,000 

 years or more. The earliest period is represented l)y the echinus 

 eaters, a people of the lowest culture, seemingly without fire, and, 

 so far as the evidence goes, without implements or utensils of any 

 kind, and necessarily without boats or any other possible means of 

 sailing the seas. The second occupants were fish-eating tribes, who 

 may have had craft of the simplest kind, but certainly none fitted 

 for long voyages. The people of the third period were more ad- 

 vanced, approximating to the historic tribes in culture. The first 

 and second occupants were necessai'ily of continental American 

 origin, and the same statement is no doubt equally true of the third. 

 In all the deposits not a trace was found indicating that stranger 

 wayfarers of higher culture, or of any culture, had ever passed that 

 way. Had this chain of islands been a thoroughfare for migrating 

 tribes this could hardly be true. Stations would have been made on 

 all the larger islands and some indications of their presence would 

 remain to the present day. The Commander Islands, forming the 

 western links of the chain, were not inhabited when first visited by 

 civilized num, and no traces thereon of occupancy of any kind have 

 been as yet reported. There is thus an interval of more than 300 

 miles on this hypothetical route in which no evidence has been found 

 of human presence, while an expanse of a thousand miles or more 

 shows no trace of migrating peoples. None of the native peoples 

 of the whole North Pacific coast from Japan to California, when 

 first known to the whites, would have ventured to navigate the broad 

 expanse of open sea that separates the outer members of the Aleu- 



' Dall, On Succession in tbe Shell-heaps of the Aleutian Islands. 



