Dead villages abound. On consulting the older Russian records, however, it is seen that nearly all were still "living" as late as the early forties of the last century. Yet there are sites that were "dead" already when the Russians came, and the accumulations in other cases denotes a long occupation.
The site of a dead village, in summer, is generally marked by richer and greener vegetation; same as on the Yukon. The site itself is usually pitted or humped in a line forming a more or less elevated ridge, or the pits may be disseminated without apparently much order. And there may be irregular mound-like heaps without external traces of any structure.
In the older sites no trace of wood is visible; in the later rotten posts, crosspieces, parts of the covering of the house or tunnel, or even a whole habitation may be present. In the old sites the wood is hewn with stone axes; in the later it is sawed, and there may be nails.
Older accumulations lie occasionally beneath more recent ones, though no interruption of continuity may be traceable. Of a superposition of villages no trace was observable.
FOOTNOTES:
[60] Tenth Census, VIII; reprinted in Compilation of Narratives of Explorations in Alaska. U. S. Senate Rept. 1023, Washington, 1900, 55-281.
[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.