Alaska -- Antiquities; Eskimos; Eskimos -- Anthropometry; Indians of North America -- Alaska; Indians of North America -- Yukon
Afternoon. Walk 8 miles along the beach, to a cape and back, looking
in vain for traces of human habitation and collecting along the beach
what this offers, which outside of some odd, flat, polished stones is
but little. Come back near 6--soon after supper--and hear with much
satisfaction that, after all, we will go to-night to St. Michael.
RÉSUMÉ
So ends the Yukon and its immediate vicinity. What has been learned?
1. The great and easily navigable river, extending for many hundreds of
miles from west to east, could not but have played a material 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 is 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 anything 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 remains 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
Nulato, about Kaltag and the Greyling River, at Bonasila, 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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