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Arctic archaeologies: recent work on Beringia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2015

Herbert Maschner*
Affiliation:
Idaho Museum of Natural History, 921 S. 8th, Stop 8096, Idaho State University, Pocatello, Idaho 83209, USA (Email: [email protected])

Extract

This review considers three books on the archaeology of territories situated around the Bering Sea—a region often referred to as Beringia, adopting the term created for the Late Pleistocene landscape that extended from north-east Asia, across the Bering Land Bridge, to approximately the Yukon Territory of Canada. This region is critical to the archaeology of the Arctic for two fundamental reasons. First, it is the gateway to the Americas, and was certainly the route by which the territory was colonised at the end of the last glaciation. Second, it is the place where the entire Aleut-Eskimo (Unangan, Yupik, Alutiiq, Inupiat and Inuit) phenomenon began, and every coastal culture from the far north Pacific, to Chukotka, to north Alaska, and to arctic Canada and Greenland, has its foundation in the cultural developments that occurred around the Bering Sea.

Type
Review
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2015 

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References

Dumond, D. 1987. A reexamination of Eskimo-Aleut prehistory. American Anthropologist 89: 3256.Google Scholar
de Laguna, F. 1947. Prehistory of North America as seen from the Yukon (Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology 3). Washington (DC): Society for American Archaeology.Google Scholar