Archaeological Investigations in Southwestern Alaska

Abstract

Despite considerable activity during the last two decades our knowledge of the archaeology of Alaska is still rather scanty. Very few places have been thoroughly investigated, and almost all work has been confined to two areas, a northern including St. Lawrence Island and a southern including the Aleutian Islands. The intermediate area, from Wales to Port Möller, with a coast line of approximately 2000 miles, is virtually unknown from an archaeological point of view. If archaeological material from this area exists in museum collections, it is unpublished and thus useless to most students. The need of information about the archaeology of this part of Alaska was felt very badly by the writer during his work on the analysis of the Ipiutak culture. When it became apparent that early Kachemak Bay culture must belong to the same Paleo-Eskimo complex as Ipiutak, it was natural to assume the former existence of the same complex in the intermediate area, an assumption which ethnological evidence seems to bear out.