74 
stone, so that iron was still very scarce. Now, the Russians reached 
Anadyr, in northeastern Siberia, in 1649, soon after which date iron must 
have been fairly plentiful among all the Chukchee tribes in the vicinity. 
The Chukchee are in close contact with the Siberian Eskimos who cross 
every summer from East cape to Wales. The first iron probably reached 
Wales, therefore, within 25 or 50 years of the Russian visit to Anadyr, and 
the three houses that contained iron harpoon points must have been 
abandoned about 1700. 
The floors of these houses were covered by from 12 to 20 inches of 
soil, some of which — we cannot tell how much— lay originally on the roofs. 
The floor of the uppermost house on the bank was about 2 feet 6 inches 
below the surface, and contained no iron; it dates, probably, from a slightly 
earlier period, although the evidence is not conclusive. The mound dwell- 
ings were certainly much older. Their floors lay at an average depth of 
3 feet, of which more than 2 feet must represent the slow accumulation of 
soil after the caving in of their roofs. The sand-bars that now block the 
mouth of the creek, damming it back to form a lagoon, also indicate con- 
siderable antiquity; for their presence is due to the gradual building out 
of the coast-line, and since their formation two other bars have developed 
a short distance out from the beach, making a landing very difficult in 
rough weather. Furthermore, the mound dwellings showed no traces of 
iron, pipes, fish-nets, or sealing-harpoons with closed sockets such as 
appeared in the other houses. Hence they must date from a considerably 
earlier period, although we cannot estimate their age in years. Their 
desertion was deliberate, since the inhabitants had carried away most of 
their possessions; probably it was occasioned by the silting up of the 
creek-mouth. 
The oldest ruin excavated, perhaps, was the lower of the two houses 
on the bank, with a floor 5 feet below the surface. Very few specimens 
were found at this level, but a sealing-harpoon seemed to differ slightly 
from those in the mound dwellings and suggested an earlier type that is 
known from other parts of Alaska. 
The excavations at Wales prove that Eskimo culture underwent 
remarkably little change in Bering strait for several centuries preceding 
the European discovery. In the modern graves on the hillsides are soap- 
stone lamps that have come from the eastward, and triple-hooked grapples 
for retrieving seals, that were borrowed from the Chukchee; both are 
recent additions to the material culture of the natives and do not appear 
in the old ruins. The first contact with Russian civilization, again, brought 
in iron, fish-nets, pipes, and beads, none of which was known to the older 
inhabitants. But if we exclude these newer objects, the remains in all the 
ruins were remarkably similar; with hardly an exception, the implements 
found in the mound dwellings were indistinguishable from those used by 
the Eskimos down to the middle of the nineteenth century. 
The frequency of body armour in all the ruins bears out the traditions 
of the natives that they were constantly at war with the surrounding 
peoples, both in Asia and Alaska. This armour, which consisted of rec- 
tangular plates of ivory lashed together like a coat of mail, was apparently 
unknown to Eskimos outside the Bering Sea area. Unknown outside, too, 
were the heavy ivory sinkers for fishing-lines, shaped like long plummets 
of lead, which were found in large numbers at Wales and on Diomede 
islands. It was interesting to discover that the mound dwellers were 
