iirdi.i.-kaJ ARCHEOLOGY OF WESTERN ESKIMO 183 



end of the Seward Peninsula. The few houses on the Little Diomede 

 are made of loose unhewn stone slabs. The dwellings of the King 

 Islanders are built on the rocky slope of the island on platforms sup- 

 ported by poles, all of driftwood. 



There is as a rule an absence of separate refuse heaps near the 

 villages. The refuse apparently has been dumped about and be- 

 tween the houses rather than on separate piles. 



Dead villages abound. On consulting the older Russian records, 

 however, it is seen that nearly all were still " living" as late as the 

 early forties of the last century. Yet there are sites that were 

 "dead" already when the Russians came, and the accumulations in 

 other cases denotes a long occupation. 



The site of a dead village, in summer, is generally marked by 

 richer and greener vegetation; same as on the Yukon. The site 

 itself is usually pitted or humped in a line forming a more or less 

 elevated ridge, or the pits may be disseminated without apparently 

 much order. And there may be irregular moundlike heaps without 

 external traces of any structure. 



In the older sites no trace of wood is visible; in the later rotten 

 posts, crosspieces, parts of the covering of the house or tunnel, or even 

 a whole habitation may be present. In the old sites the wood is 

 hewn with stone axes; in the later it is sawed, and there may be nails. 



Older accumulations lie occasionally beneath more recent ones, 

 though no interruption of continuity may be traceable. Of a super- 

 position of villages no. trace was observable. 



Burial Grounds 



Due to the impossibility of digging sufficiently deep into the frozen 

 ground the western Eskimo buried their dead near or on the surface 

 or among rocks. Occasionally they utilized also, it seems, old dwell- 

 ings for this purpose, and in more recent times at least the surface 

 burials, wherever there was driftwood, would be protected by heavy 

 rough-hewn planks put together in the form of boxes or by drift- 

 wood. They bear close fundamental resemblance to those of the 

 Yukon. On the Nunivak Island occur graves made of rough stone 

 slabs piled up without much order. (PI. 31, a, b.) 



Throughout the region the burials were located near the village, 

 but the distance varied according to local conditions and habits. In 

 some of the Eskimo villages of the lower Yukon, as at Old Hamil- 

 ton, some burials were close to the houses of the living. In the Bering 

 and Arctic regions the burial grounds, though sometimes of necessity 

 not far from the houses, as at the Little Diomede, in other places, 

 as at Point Hope and Barrow, were at a distance extending to beyond 

 a mile and a half from the village. 



