heolicka] WRITER'S TRIP ON YUKON 81 



RESUME 



So ends the Yukon and its immediate vicinity. What has been 

 learned ? 



1. The great and easily navigable river, extending for many hun- 

 dreds of miles from west to east, could not but have played a ma- 

 terial part in the peopling of Alaska, and quite probably in that 

 of the continent, and all human movements along it must have left 

 some material remains. It seems, therefore, a justified inference that 

 the valley of the Yukon harbors human remains of much scientific 

 value. 



2. Such remains, judging from the present conditions, were left 

 exclusively along the banks of the river, on the flood-safe elevated 

 platforms of the banks, and especially about the mouths of the 

 tributaries of the Yukon of those times. 



3. But the banks and mouths of the past are seldom, if ever, those 

 of to-day. The river, with its currents, storms, and ice pack every 

 spring, is changing from year to year. It lis ever cutting and eroding 

 in places, and building bars and islands or covering with flood silts 

 in others. In many stretches no one can be sure where the banks 

 were 500 or 1,000 years ago, not to speak of earlier periods. 



4. The banks and islands of to-day, therefore, are for the most 

 part recent formations, in which it would be useless to expect any- 

 thing very ancient. And there is nothing like the successive ocean 

 beaches at Nome and elsewhere, which would guide exploration. 



5. The right hilly side of the river alone seems to offer some hope 

 of locating some more ancient sites and remains; yet it is quite 

 certain that the river ran once far to the left, for all the vast flats 

 on that side are of its construction ; so that the more ancient re- 

 mains of man may lie in that direction. But there everything is, 

 from the point of view of archeology, a practically unexplorable 

 jungle and wilderness, and there is no one there who might make 

 accidental discoveries. 



6. It would seem that the best hope for the archeologist along the 

 Yukon, so far as the more ancient remains are concerned, lies along 

 the tributaries of the stream, and that particularly at the old limits 

 of the more recently made lands. 



7. Nevertheless the banks of the Yukon as they are now are not 

 wholly barren. Up from Tanana, at the Old Station, probably about 

 Ruby and Xulato, about Kaltag and the Greyling River, at Bona- 

 sila, Holy Cross and Ghost Creek, and at the Mountain village, Dog 

 village. Russian Mission, and doubtless a number of other sites, they 

 contain both cultural and skeletal remains that, if recovered, will be 

 invaluable to the anthropological history of these regions. 



