by Hugh M. Lewis

Two sets of sites, on Anangula Island and at Chaluka village between Umnak Lake and Nikolski Bay, are critically important to understanding the prehistoric continuity of Aleutian culture over the last 9,000 years (William S. Laughlin, Aleuts: Survivors of the Bering Land Bridge, 1980, pages 62-106)

The Anangula sites, in context with other archaeological evidence in the Aleutian Islands, provide an exceptional example of prehistoric continuity of culture for the Aleutian peoples over a time frame spanning approximately 8,700 years, that is contemporaneous with an early Neolithic transition in the world. Few if any other places in North America are capable of demonstrating the same kind of culture historical continuity in such a deep time frame. The deep continuity of Aleutian culture therefore suggests as well the relative isolation and conservation of culture of this region in relation to other surrounding areas, as well as its remarkable adaptability. The issue of depth of continuity of culture in North America is especially difficult to establish, and is of critical modern importance in the political contest of native claims versus anthropological interests concerning the appropriation of indigenous cultural and paleontological artifacts.

Anangula Island consists several different sites. The most remarkable is the blade site located on the southern end of the island containing more than 2.8 million stone artifacts within a narrow strata that has been compressed by time to a width of a third of a meter. Stone blades and burins and their associated cores, providing complete evidence of an entire stone-tool industry, come from this site spanning 1,500 years (8700-7200 BP) Prismatic blades were struck from the edges of a core that was prepared by striking a flat platform, which was renewed with successive use of the core by striking more tablet-flake cross-sections off the top of the core. Blades from the early period were unifacial and show evidence of slight retouching. Evidence from the later village site that is near to the blade site but on a higher elevation, date from a later period of time (between 7000 and 4000 BP), and demonstrate both early unifacial prismatic blades as well as demonstrating a transition (approximately 6000 BP) from unifacial to bifacially flaked blades. The village demonstrates clear use and continuity up until the 19^th Century, and its use as a summer camp. Evidence of Chaluka site demonstrates continuity with the late Anangula evidence, and proceeds from 4,000 to the present. Evidence from these sites also include seal oil lamps, carved stone dishes, grinding stones, palettes for grinding red ochre, line weights, lava abraders for smoothing the wooden shafts of spears, arrows, boat pieces, unifacial obsidian scrapers, burins, blades and cores. The same cultural traits are present at the later Chaluka site across the bay at Nikolski, and therefore provide evidence for a remarkable span of 8,700 years. Dating at this sites was accomplished by seriation with ash layers deposited during known volcanic events, and by radio-carbon dating. Many of the blade types found at Anangula are similar to stone artifacts excavated in Siberia and in the Kamchatka Peninsula, and therefore demonstrate an even deeper continuity with Paleo-Siberian cultural heritages. Contemporaneous village sites along the coast of Peru dating to 9,000 BP and earlier, suggest that a maritime adaptation extended well around the entire continents of North and South America by this time.

Evidence at Anangula serves to unite to some extent the archaeology of Asia with the New World. The archaeology of Asia has deep origins, but is underrepresented in the literature and by a surfeit of paleontological evidence. Political divisiveness and national chauvinism of nations continue to hamper archaeological research in this region. The archaeology of the New World has been the main and central focus of most of American Anthropology for the past 100 years, but evidence from this region remains relatively shallow in time depth, and again, represented by a paucity of paleontological representatives.

I believe that the Anangula sites, in provenience with other important sites of the Aleutians and surrounding areas, has anthropological significance for a number of reasons.

First, it demonstrates that the peopling of the New World occurred over several periods of time, during an earlier and extensive paleolithic period, which probably witnessed numerous successive migrations of people over the Bering Straits and through "Beringia," as well as during early and later neolithic phases. Many of these people might have continued by boat as recently as two to three thousand years ago. The peopling of North America consisted of multiple migration events, primarily through the Bering straits area, either by land or by sea. The people who migrated, in general, came well equipped and prepared for the challenges of survival in the New World, carrying with them the tools and the know-how to adapt technologies to new environments.

Second, it demonstrates evidence for an advanced marine-coastal adaptation of culture that was probably part of a larger, more generalized complex, and thus it provides clear evidence for a maritime hypothesis that is elaborated below (Lewis, Southeast Asian Sources, 1993-4). A maritime hypothesis shows a waterways adaptation to boating and exploitation of marine resources, to the development of long distance networks, and to the development of cultural adaptations capable of overcoming the challenges and obstacles presented by marine and waterway environments. A maritime hypothesis suggests that people of the late paleolithic and early neolithic had achieved a remarkable degree of sophistication and cultural development by means of waterway adaptation, and this adaptation led to early long distance trade and communication networks which contributed to the spread of new cultural ideas. It is a claim that such waterways adaptation provided an important feedback mechanism to the development of early human civilization.

Third, the evidence of Anangula, coupled with physical anthropological evidence derived from mummified skeletons, provides a possible profile for human evolutionary development in the region, and a strong regime of natural and cultural selection that led to the survival of the Aleuts as an exceptional group and culture of people. It is rare to find this kind of correlative pattern in the record, especially for North America in which sense of history is shallow and prehistory is overshadowed by a surfeit of both hard and soft data. While the interpretation of skeletal evidence and transitions in the human fossil record remains open to debate, it is clear that continuous trait-variation has occurred in the human species, especially relating to dental, facial and cranial characteristics. It is possible, for instance to correlate sinodontic and sundodontic characteristics involving cusp patterns and shoveling of incisors with cranial and facial measures of breadth, height and length, as evidence demonstrating the distributions of people in both time and space from Asia to the New World. These kinds of patterns can be then correlated with other associated archaeological, linguistic and cultural trait configurations.

An alternative "waterways" hypothesis is proffered regarding the culture ecological role of human adaptation to marine environments as a "primary mover" and possible interregional catalyst to the systemic development of early human civilization. This hypothesis represents a general extension and revision to Karl Wittfogel's "hydraulic hypothesis" as a prime mover in early despotic states, to encompass the entire range of human relationships to water and its resources as a primary environmental constraint in the multivariate "systemic circumscription" of early civilization.

The paucity of evidence due to the weathering and poor preservation effects of exposure to water, the shifting of coastlines and river-courses, the rising and falling of water levels, and alluvial flooding, have precluded the formulation of any major hypothesis regarding the role of human lacustrian, riverine and marine adaptations in the development of early civilizations.

An ethnohistorical reconstruction of human marine adaptations must take into account the vital role which rivers, lakes, coast-lines and seas may have long played in interregional cultural integration as channels of communication, control, and transmission. Such maritime reconstruction must also take into account possible periods and processes of three analytical phases--prehistoric, proto-historic and historic, as well as the interregional "trans-local" character of the processes of contact, acculturation, diffusion, migration and stimulus generation underlying the development of human civilization.

The adaptation to exploitation of aquatic resources may have provided an important resource base in the promotion of population growth and social-environmental circumscription stimulating early human social formation, development and migration. Fishing-Farming cultures have been closely associated in the archaeological record with the beginnings of agricultural development. (Carl O. Sauer Seeds, Spades, Hearths & Herds: The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs 1952, pgs. 24-5.)

Bodies of water may have long provided important barriers which may have served as "thresholds of integration" in the early development of human civilization--overcoming the barrier presented by water required optimal levels of social organization and technological sophistication, while mastery of the waterways has always conferred a tremendous power and strategic advantage.

The model of the "waterways" hypothesis; is a systemic one in which the relative availability and control of water is both a "resonance dampening" and a "resonance amplification" mechanism in the development of human social organization and integration. (Kent Flannery "The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations" in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics" 3, 1972: pgs. 399-426, and "Archaeological Systems Theory and Early Mesoamerica" in Anthropological Archaeology in the Americas Washington D. C.: 1971: pgs. 67-87.)

The consequence is that the control of water has been a primary mover in the development of human civilization. This model may be summed up by the following set of hypothetical postulates. It has served both as a "first-order" resonance dampening mechanism (A) of social-environmental circumscription and as a "second-order" resonance amplification mechanism (B) leading to the systemic, interregional organization:

A. Waterways have provided an important set of factors contributing to the systemic circumscription of local and regional human populations.

I. Periods of Glaciation and rising/falling sea levels and accompanying climactic fluctuations may have created the early demographic/environmental circumscription which lead to the evolution of modern humans and their cultural complex.

a. Advancing and retreating coastlines may have had a consequence of facilitating adaptive radiation and then divergent isolation--leading to a "founder effect."

b. Rising water levels and advancing glaciers may have induced intense periods of environmental/social circumscription in some areas, resulting in rapid selection.

II. Water, its availability or scarcity, has always served as a critical constraining factor in human social patterning.

a. Control of water as a critical resource, as an unpredictable menace, and as a strategic advantage, has long been a primary preoccupation of and impetus for human social organization.

1. Natural precipitation has always been an uncertain and undependable source of water.

2. The collection of a stable supply of fresh water, in either natural or artificial reservoirs, has long been a primary social preoccupation of human groups.

3. The earliest vessels served the function of containing water.

b. Large bodies of water and concourses have provided an important, relatively stable protein resource pool upon which large and healthy human populations can be supported.

1. Specialized adaptations/technologies/techniques in the cultural ecology of aquatic resource exploitation was an early, and important, extension of the human resource base.

c. The production or abundance of a stable supply of food has always depended upon a predictable and stable supply of water.

1. Assurance a stable, steady supply of water stimulated the development of artificial water control technologies and techniques.

III. Large bodies of water and concourses have long been both obstacles to human movement and communication that have always challenged people to overcome.

a. Overcoming the natural obstacles imposed by large bodies of water and concourses have required a minimal degree of technical invention, cooperative social organization and political integration.

1. Irrigation and flood control projects required the mobilization and coordination of large numbers of people.

2. Shipbuilding, fishing, and trading required craft-role specialization.

b. The challenge of overcoming the obstacles posed by waterways provided a "springboard" for more complex social organization and development.

B. Mastering the challenges presented by the obstacles of waterways conferred important strategic advantages in transportation, communication, command and mobility that allowed groups to extend their range of exploitation and control to encompass a broader spectrum of environments and resources than otherwise possible.

I. Gaining control of waterways made possible trans-local, regional integration and interregional contact and diffusion.

a. Waterways provided a fast and efficient route of transportation and communication.

II. Maintaining control of waterways required the development of secondary social institutions to manage and mobilize people in construction projects, in trade and commerce, and to protect the strategic lines of communication afforded by waterway traffic.

a. Control of piracy became a major preoccupation of many states, providing the basis for interstate cooperation, and for the organization and mobilization of navies to protect the waterways.

III. Development of waterways made possible the growth of a cosmopolitan way of life based upon interregional trade and water-born commerce.

a. There occurred a transformation of cultural adaptations that led to increasing interregional interdependencies upon waterway trade and traffic--in both basic commodities and in sumptuary and symbolic goods and capital.

1. Sociocultural institutions were rapidly modified in adaptation and dependency upon access to non-local resources most readily available by waterborne transportation.

2. There occurred a secondary patterning of competition and conflict that led to a pattern of imperial "rise and fall" development of states, chronic warfare and increasing incorporation of peripheral regions into the nexus of traffic and trade.

IV. Mastering maritime transportation stimulated and facilitated diffusion and intercultural contact, providing:

a. An escape valve for relieving of population and environmental pressures.

b. A maritime "frontier" for early pioneers.

Early periods of glaciation and the accompanying rising and falling of sea levels, accompanying shifting of coastlines and climactic fluctuations may have created the early demographic/environmental circumscription which stimulating development of modern humans and their cultural complex. Advancing and retreating coastlines may have had a consequence of facilitating adaptive radiation and then divergent isolation--leading to a "founder effect". Rising water levels and advancing glaciers may have induced intense periods of environmental/social circumscription in some areas, resulting in rapid selection.

Water, its availability or scarcity, has always served as a critical constraining factor in human social patterning. The control of water as a critical resource, as an unpredictable menace, and as a strategic advantage, and the collection of a stable supply of fresh water in natural or artificial reservoirs, has long been a primary preoccupation of and impetus for human social organization. Natural precipitation has always been an uncertain and undependable source of water. The earliest vessels served the function of containing water.

The production or abundance of a stable supply of food has always depended upon a predictable and stable supply of water. Assurance a stable, steady supply of water stimulated the development of artificial water control technologies and techniques.

Large bodies of water and concourses have provided an important, relatively stable protein resource pool upon which large and healthy human populations can be supported. Specialized cultural adaptations, technologies and techniques in the cultural ecology of aquatic resource exploitation was an early, and important, achievement extending the human resource base.

Large bodies of water and concourses have long been obstacles to human movement and communication. Overcoming the natural obstacles imposed by large bodies of water and concourses have required a minimal degree of technical invention, cooperative social organization and political integration, the challenge of overcoming these obstacles posed by waterways providing a springboard for more complex social organization and development. Shipbuilding, fishing, and trading required skill and experience.

Mastering the challenges presented by the obstacles of waterways conferred important strategic advantages in transportation, communication, command and mobility that allowed groups to extend their range of exploitation and control to encompass a broader spectrum of environments and resources than otherwise possible. Gaining control of waterways made possible trans-local, regional integration and interregional contact and diffusion. Waterways provided a fast and efficient route of transportation and communication. Mastering maritime transportation stimulated and facilitated diffusion and intercultural contact, providing an escape valve for relieving of population and environmental pressures and a maritime frontier for early pioneers.

Maintaining control of waterways required the development of secondary social institutions to manage and mobilize people in construction projects, in trade and commerce, and to protect the strategic lines of communication afforded by waterway traffic.

Control of piracy became a major preoccupation of many states, providing the basis for interstate cooperation, and for the organization and mobilization of navies to protect the waterways.

Development of waterways made possible the growth of a cosmopolitan way of life based upon interregional trade and water-born commerce. There occurred a transformation of cultural adaptations that led to increasing interregional interdependencies upon waterway trade and traffic--in both basic commodities and in sumptuary and symbolic goods and capital. Sociocultural institutions were rapidly modified in adaptation and dependency upon access to non-local resources most readily available by water-born transportation.

There occurred a secondary patterning of competition and conflict that led to a pattern of imperial rise and fall development of states, chronic warfare and increasing incorporation of peripheral regions into the nexus of traffic and trade.

The net consequence is that the control of water has been a primary mover in the development of human civilization. It has served both as a "first-order" resonance dampening mechanism (A) of social-environmental circumscription and as (B) a "second-order" resonance amplification mechanism leading to the systemic, interregional organization.

Many regions are candidates for such an hypothesis. For instance: the circum-Mediterranean region including the reaches of the Nile throughout the early history and prehistory of Europe and Western Asia; the North Atlantic during the period of the "Red Paint Peoples" and later during the era of Viking conquest and settlement; the "Sea of Sunrise"/Tigris-Euphrates region in the early civilizations of Mesopotamia and Dilmun; the Gulf of Mexico/Carribbean region during the periods of the pristine MesoAmerican Civilizations; the central role of lakes in the development of many early civilizations--Olmec/Toltec/Aztec, the Bugandan state in Africa; the role of rivers in others --the Indus-system of Harappa, the Red-River in North Vietnam, the Yang-tse in early China; early maritime-riverine-delta "Mandala" civilizations of protohistorical Southeast Asia, the Niger in the early development of African Nok Civilization; the Nile in the case of Egyptian Civilization; the Northeast Coast complex in native North America extending from Alaska down to the coasts of California, the development of riverine cultural complexes throughout Amazon and Orinoco riverine systems, the Missourian-Mississipian Mound-building complex, the transmigration, trade networks and high Island/low Island tributary complexes of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, and the Circum-polar adaptations of the Inuit peoples. Though many early civilizations may not necessarily have developed in such a way, Incan civilization, Aztec Civilization, Southwest Amer-Indian civilization, the very early role of a single ocean in the regional and interregional development of Southeast Asian civilization cannot be ignored.

*****

The challenge of demonstrating a Maritime hypothesis is showing the kind of hard evidence conservative archaeologists are prone to accept, when probably most of this evidence lies submerged along coastal shelves due to rising seal levels of inter-glacial and post-glacial periods. It seems that a maritime hypothesis became relevant during the last 50,000 years, and especially over the last 20,000 years, exactly during the times when glaciers reached their zenith and sea levels were at their lowest. Evidence of the peopling of Southeast Asia and of the Australian continent demonstrate for instance the presence of a strong maritime adaptation at least 40,000 BP. The earliest modern Homo sapiens sapiens known is a female from the Niah Caves in Borneo, dating approximately 37000 BP. It is likely that peopling of the New World proceeded either at the same time, or soon afterward. In my mind, there is no reason not to assume that a well developed maritime cultural adaptation existed along the fringes of most continents and major waterways between 20,000 and 10,000 BP, supporting village communities up to 1,000 people, and this early cultural development provided a necessary framework and prelude for the later emergence of sedentary civilizations during the late neolithic.

In understanding this hypothesis in relation to the New World, it is not unreasonable to assume that an early neolithic peopling of the Americas did not primarily occur by means of boats and migration along coastal waterways, and from there proceeded up major streams and their tributaries to penetrate hinterland regions following the recession of glaciers. This hypothesis would have meant fairly extensive trade-network patterns along the coastal waterways of the American continents at a fairly early period, and the development of fairly large population densities that led in time to increasing penetration of the continental interiors. As people moved into interior regions, they experienced cultural loss associated with a maritime adaptation, and adapted their technologies for a terrestrial forest environment. If a paleolithic peoples already existed in the interior, based upon an earlier mammoth hunting culture, then these peoples were probably fairly sparse on the landscape and were either displaced or absorbed by the newcomers. They would have been pushed to isolated interior regions, much as the Neandertals of Europe appear to have become displaced and isolated in remote regions.

The conservatism of archaeology is no more clearly demonstrated than in the tendency to ascribe only the most shallow depths possible to human cultural adaptation and development. I believe this conservatism to be based upon both a defensive self-interest to protect one's professional turf from any attack, and also from a naïve understanding of the early sophistication and cultural adaptiveness of paleolithic human beings to meet the challenges and overcome the obstacles presented by the natural environment. There is no reason to assume an "out of Africa" hypothesis of 35,000 BP in Europe when modern Homo sapiens are clearly evident in Borneo, New Guinea and Australia before this date. In other words, our paleolithic precursors were probably far more sophisticated and intelligent than we tend to give them credit for, and the diffusional influence of cultural adaptation far more wide-spread and rapid, than most archaeologists would admit to.

In this regard, we can reconsider the three main points of significance of the Anangula and Chaluka sites (i.e., the Asian connection and multiple migrations to the New World; a demonstration of a Waterways hypothesis in cultural development; and the evolutionary development and distribution of people through time and across space.) We can say that these three points may be significantly interrelated when we consider the connection between cultural evolution and the evolutionary emergence of humankind as a culture bearing animal in ecological adaptation to complex and challenging environments. This is clearly evident in Aleutian soft culture, showing a remarkable ability to invent new forms, adopt foreign elements, and an equally unusual attention to empirical, descriptive detail and concern with factual reality. Magical and spiritual systems are mechanical and contagiously methodical, almost as if they were precursors to scientific method. The adoption of a single spirit deity is highly unusual, and one must ask if this adoption may not have been borrowed directly or indirectly from old and remote contacts with other distant cultures, or else just independently invented along the way. The use of detailed anatomical references, and the comparative anatomy of sea mammals and humans, like the ability to talk about 100,000, suggests a remarkable and unusual capacity for cultural development that was critically tied to the challenges of successfully managing and surviving in the Aleutian islands, one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments in the world.

In closing, I would state that my only argument with the Laughlin text is to state unequivocally that the ancestors of Aleuts were probably already a maritime-adapted people by the time they reached the Aleutian islands, and therefore did not need the Bering Land Bridge to make their original passage from the Old World to the New World. They were probably following in the paddle-wake of fishing, sea-faring people who had been probably making this passage for the previous ten millennia, and not in the footsteps of Paleolithic bison hunters who were bound to dry land.