Eskimo Dug-Outs

THE expedition of the University Museum and the Danish National Museum to Prince William Sound, Alaska, In 1933, acquired three interesting specimens, which are described in the following article by Dr. Frederica de Laguna, co-leader with Dr. Kaj Birket-Smith of the expedition.

A UNIQUE discovery was made in the course of our archaeological work in Prince William Sound. This consists of small dug-out canoes, remarkable not for their shape or method of construction, but because they are the first wooden canoes known to have been made by the Eskimo.

While we were excavating an ancient Eskimo village site, Palugvik, “Where the People Are Sad,” an old Eskimo chief told us the following story: There were formerly two villages at Palugvik, one on the east point and one on the west point, separated by a tiny bay, not more than a quarter of a mile wide. Two old ladies of noble birth started out from the east point to dance for the young girls of the west point. They wore ear ornaments, nose-pins, and labrets, and to look comical had propped open their eye-lids with little sticks. They were paddling a wooden canoe, and when half-way across, the wind blew up suddenly and upset them. Next morning the people found their bodies on the shore. After that, people used to wait for the low tide and walk around by the beach, and every year on the day that the old women had drowned the inhabitants of all the neighboring villages would hold a remembrance feast in their honor. In telling this story, the old chief used the Eyak Indian word for dug-out, and described the canoe as a hollowed log. We did not then realize that this canoe was probably of Eskimo manufacture.

Later we were told that the Eskimo living in the northern part of the Sound used to make wooden canoes, some big enough to carry nine men, and that they would take them in preference to their skin boats when going up the ice-filled fjords to the salmon streams. It was not until we actually found wooden canoes in an Eskimo burial cave that we could fully credit these reports.

Long before we visited this cave we had heard of it from both natives and whites. It is called Palutat, “The Lost” or “Hidden People,” because the bodies found in it were supposed to be those of people who had hidden there from enemies, or according to another story, had been storm-bound, and so starved to death. The cave is also mentioned in the following Eskimo legend, which offers still another explanation of the bodies in it.

A man had five nephews, twelve sons, and a wife. When he was dying he gave his fine spear with throwing-board to his youngest nephew. Then he died.

The nephews and sons went into one house and began to divide up the dead man’s things among themselves. The nephews quarreled over the hunting spear. The oldest son said that his father had wanted to give it to the youngest nephew, but the oldest nephew said that it had been given to him. They began to fight. The oldest son grabbed the spear and threw it into the fire.

They were all angry and went away. The sons and some of the nephews went to all the different places in Prince William Sound, and that is how the villages were started. But most of the nephews and their families went to Palutat, into the big dry cave. They pulled their skin boats up and piled all their hunting weapons together. Then they sat down with their backs against the wall and their knees drawn up to their chins, and the women held the babies. They died that way and dried up. You could see them there long afterwards.

None of these explanations is satisfactory, however, since the bodies found in the cave were certainly those of persons who had been buried there, though by now the Eskimo have forgotten that their ancestors used to practise cave burial. Mummies of six men are said to have been found at Palutat, dressed in wooden armor and groundhog skins, with wooden masks on their faces. Some white men took them to Valdez, where they were exhibited in a saloon, and eventually fell to pieces.

This cave proved to be one of the most important sites explored by the expedition, though when we visited it, no one realized that anything of interest had been left in it. We found a number of skeletons, wrapped in bark matting and interred in wooden coffins. One of these is now on exhibit in the Eskimo Hall of the University Museum. Besides stone and bone tools, such perishable objects as slats for wooden armor, knife handles, spear shafts, fire drills, paddles, parts of the frame and skin covering of kayaks and umiaks, and even portions of skin clothing had been preserved by the dryness. The three dug-outs, of which one is now in Copenhagen, one in the Washington State Museum, and one on exhibit in the University Museum, were found in scattered fragments on the floor of the cave. We imagine that they were left as gifts for the dead. The canoes are all about the same size, measuring twelve feet in length, two feet in width and two feet in depth, and would have carried only a single person. The prow is sharply undercut; the stern slopes gradually. There seems to have been a single small thwart, just aft of the middle. The canoes were shaped with small stone adzes, the marks of which are clearly visible, and fire was used to assist in the operation of chopping out the inside.

The natives of Prince William Sound, being the most southerly of the Alaskan Eskimo, are in contact with the Eyak Indians, just to the east, who build wooden canoes. It was undoubtedly from the latter, as the use of the Eyak word shows, that the Eskimo learned how to build dug-outs. These wooden boats were never used for hunting, for they are much slower than the kayak or bidarka, and they were probably never used for travel in rough water, because they are more easily swamped, but they would have been safer, perhaps, in the quiet waters of the northern fjords, where floating glacier ice might easily break the skin covers of kayaks and umiaks.