Word: ipiutak
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Larsen was at New York's American Museum of Natural History, gloating over the take of an airborne summer "dig." He had been in Alaska trying to determine the extent of the Ipiutak (ancient Eskimo) culture that flourished there 2,000 years ago. The forgotten culture, apparently, had more connection with Asia than with North America. Its elaborate tools and art objects look Siberian or Chinese...
Last summer, with Dr. James L. Giddings of the University of Alaska, Dr. Larsen chartered an airplane and explored the desolate shore of the Bering Sea north of Bristol Bay. There he found more than 50 characteristic Ipiutak sites: shallow depressions where the earth-covered wooden dugouts had collapsed into the ground. The ruins were certainly made by the Ipiutaks-Eskimos fresh from Asia and still retaining many Asiatic ways...
Most scientists believe that the Asiatic immigrants who people the Americas crossed Bering Strait in a low state of culture. But the Ipiutak people, Larsen thinks, were a notable exception. They brought along a rich, if savage, Siberian culture, with roots as far away as the Ural Mountains. Among the remarkable objects found in Ipiutak ruins are chains and swivels cut laboriously out of walrus ivory. They have no strength and are obviously not for use. Larsen believes that the Ipiutaks, pushing farther & farther into Arctic America, eventually lost touch with their sources of metal. But their religion still demanded...
...lies at Ipiutak on Point Hope, a bleak sandspit in the Arctic Ocean, where no trees and little grass survive endless gales at 30° below zero. But where houses lay more than 2,000 years ago, underlying refuse makes grass and moss grow greener. The scientists could easily discern traces of long avenues and hundreds of dwelling sites. A mile long, a quarter-mile wide, this ruined city was perhaps as big as any in Alaska today (biggest: Juneau...
...with jet pupils (see cut, p. 59). Birdlike ivory beaks were substituted for the corpse's nose. Who were these people? How did they manage to live? Whence did they come, whither did they go? Says Professor Rainey: "We, as archeologists, have a difficult problem to explain the Ipiutak culture...
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