Diggers

The simple Eskimo, best known for igloos and blubber-eating, may have been a bearer of culture to the New World. The Eskimos, says Curator Helge Larsen of Denmark's National Museum, once had a highly developed art, religion and social system. Perhaps they passed on a little of their culture before they lost it all.

Dr. 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 certain objects, so their artists copied the metal chains and swivels faithfully in ivory, hoping that the gods would not notice the difference.

As they moved farther away, in both time and space, from their Asiatic homeland, the Ipiutaks shed their Asiatic culture. But Larsen hopes to prove that before the light from Asia died out, some sparks of it passed down the coast by "cultural diffusion," and affected races far to the south. Thus, he may establish one of the few, perhaps the only, cultural contact of pre-Columbian days between the Old World and the New.

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