Abstract
Dr. H. L. Shapiro and Dr. F. G. Rainey, of the American Museum of Natural History, have been excavating five hundred arctic tombs at Point Hope, Alaska. The five hundred skeletons are said to form one of the largest collections of the sort ever found at a site in America. The two anthropologists sought remains of an ancient and unknown people, whom Dr. Rainey first discovered in expeditions of 1939 and 1940. Also they sought later Eskimo burials which would aid in showing what relationship the lost ancients had to the later Eskimos. The mysterious unknown people had a remarkably big town with well—planned streets, more than a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle; and about two thousand years ago they abandoned this settlement. They are looked upon as a lost race, because their ivory arts are unlike those of known Alaskan Eskimos, ancient or modern. Also, it is explained, they lacked many typical Eskimo implements, and were more dependent on land than on the sea for their resources.
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Excavations in Alaska. Nature 148, 590 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148590b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148590b0