[61] I am especially indebted to the two maps of Zagoskin (one prepared by himself, one from his data); to the 1849 Russian map of the St. Lawrence Island; to the various maps of the U. S. Geological Survey and the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey; to the maps and data of W. H. Dall, E. W. Nelson, and Ivan Petrof; to the various reports of the _Corwin_ and other voyages in the Bering Sea and the western Arctic; to the Geographic Dictionary of Alaska, by Marcus Baker, and to the U. S. Coast Pilots of Alaska; to the data of the Alaska Division, U. S. Department of Education; to Dr. E. P. Walker, of the Biological Survey; to Father La Fortune, the Reverend Baldwin, and to Mr. Carl J. Lomen at Nome; to Mr. Sylvester Chance, superintendent in 1926 of the schools of the Kotzebue district; to Messrs. James Allen at Wainwright and Charles Brower at Barrow; and to numerous other friends who aided me in this direction. 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 dwellings 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 driftwood. 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. (Pl. 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 Hamilton, 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. As a rule the wood of burials older than about 80 years was found fully decayed with the bones secondarily buried. Of earlier burials there is generally no trace on the surface, but on excavation skeletal remains are found at various depths below the surface. These characteristic self-burials, or rather tundra burials, may prove of much importance to anthropology in the future. As outlined before (see Narrative, pp. 77, 79) the process is a decay of the wood; the sagging down of the bones, covered more or less by the decayed material; an encroachment of moss or other vegetation on the little mound thus produced; and gradual accumulation through wind or water carried materials of more covering over the bones, until the mound disappears and the remains, generally still in good condition, are buried as if intentionally inhumed.