Many of the sites to be given are now "dead" and there may be several old sites in the vicinity of a living village. Others combine ruins with present habitations. Still others are partly or even wholly abandoned a part of the year when the inhabitants go camping or hunting, and are partly or wholly occupied during the rest of the year. Finally, there are some new settlements, with modern dwellings and ways, and their number will increase, the Eskimo taking kindly to civilization and individual property.
The data to be given here are limited to the Eskimo territory in southwestern and western Alaska, leaving out those in Siberia where much is uncertain. Due to the uncertainties of the Prince William Sound region they will begin with Kodiak Island. There are also on hand, principally due to Dr. E. P. Walker, numerous locations of old sites and villages in the Indian parts of southern and southeastern Alaska, but these will best be reserved for another occasion.
The Eskimo area will be roughly seen from the accompanying map published on the basis of the enumeration by the Fourteenth United States Census of 1920. A very great part of the territory allotted to the Eskimo, as well as that of the Indian, is barren of any population or its traces; the divisions represent the hunting grounds or grounds claimed by each people, not an occupied territory. The data will be given in south-to-north order.
Nearly all the settlements in these regions are now, and have evidently always been, on the shores of the seas and bays, as close to the water as safety would permit. A few villages and sites occur also, however, on inland lakes and rivers. The favored locations have been an elevated flat near the mouth of a fresh-water stream or the outlet of a lagoon, a sufficiently elevated spit projecting into the sea, or an elevated bar between the sea and an inland lake. The essentials were an elevated flat, a supply of fresh drinking water, and a location favorable for fishing and hunting; if there was some natural protection, so much the better. There were no inland settlements except on the lakes and rivers. In a few cases, as at the Kings and the Little Diomede Islands, very difficult locations were occupied only because outweighed by other advantages.
Caves throughout the occupied region north of the Aleutian chain are absent, and there was therefore no cave habitation.
None of the settlements were very large, though a few were much larger than others. They ranged from one or two family camps or houses to villages of some hundreds of inhabitants. A large majority of the settlements had from but two or three to approximately a dozen families.
There were two main types of dwellings, the semisubterranean sod houses for the winter and the skin tents for summer. In some places the two were near each other; in others the summer dwellings were in another and at times fairly distant locality.
The "zimniki" (in Russian) or winter houses were throughout the region of one general type. They were fair-sized circular semisubterranean houses, made of driftwood and earth, and provided with a semisubterranean entrance vestibule. Their remains are characterized everywhere by a circular pit with a short straight trench depression, the same pot-and-handle type as found along the Yukon. Rarely for the construction of the houses, where driftwood did not suffice, recourse was had to whale ribs and mandibles. The "letniki," or summer houses, were constructed on the surface of wood, sod and skins, or of whale ribs and skins, approaching on one hand the summer huts of various continental tribes and on the other the "yurts" of the north Asiatic peoples. The "kashims," or communal houses, were built, much as on the Yukon, like the family dwellings, but occasionally quadrilateral and much larger. Smaller semisubterranean storage houses of driftwood and sod near the winter dwellings were seemingly general.
Ruins of stone dwellings, without mortar, are said to exist in places on Norton Sound and Bay and on a lagoon near the western end of the Seward Peninsula. The few houses on the Little Diomede are made of loose unhewn stone slabs. The dwellings of the King Islanders are built on the rocky slope of the island on platforms supported by poles, all of driftwood.
There is as a rule an absence of separate refuse heaps near the villages. The refuse apparently has been dumped about and between the houses rather than on separate piles.