Arctic archaeologies: recent work on Beringia

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.