Chapter I: Introductory Conclusions
In Order to understand the problems presented by the archaeological material from the middle and lower Yukon Valley, we will need to see this region in a cultural perspective. The area is inhabited today by Athabaskanspeaking Indians whom I call the Tena, following Jetté. These correspond to Osgood&...
| Published in: | Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology |
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| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge University Press (CUP)
1947
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0081130000003944 https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0081130000003944 |
| Summary: | In Order to understand the problems presented by the archaeological material from the middle and lower Yukon Valley, we will need to see this region in a cultural perspective. The area is inhabited today by Athabaskanspeaking Indians whom I call the Tena, following Jetté. These correspond to Osgood's Tanana, Koyukon and Ingalik. Practically all the specimens we shall have to discuss come from the territory of Osgood's last two tribes. These Tena had, at the time of white contact, a culture which was much like that of all the interior Alaskan Athabaskans, whom we can take as typical exponents of the Snowshoe hunting stage, discussed in Chapter X. The Tena differ from their relatives in two respects: first, they had a richer source of food in the salmon which come up the Yukon every summer to spawn, and second, they had borrowed much from the Eskimo. On the north, west, and southwest, Tena territory abutted on that of the Eskimo, and their strongest contacts were with the Eskimo of Kotzebue Sound, Norton Sound, the deltas of the Yukon and Kuskokwim, and Bristol Bay. |
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