ARCHEOLOGY : Bones of Prehistoric Eskimos Near End of Strange Odyssey

A flatbed truck with 13 cardboard boxes recently pulled up at the loading dock behind the University of Alaska’s museum--the next-to-the-last stop on a long, curious odyssey.

The boxes contained all that is left of about 150 prehistoric Eskimos who hunted walrus and seals on a desolate chunk of rock in the Arctic Ocean at least 1,500 years ago. Their homeland is only 40 miles off the coast of Siberia, but it now belongs to the United States.

Their trip back to St. Lawrence Island is a dramatic international enforcement of federal legislation designed to protect the graves of Native Americans. For more than 20 years, the skeletal remains have been the object of scrutiny at the University of Berne in Switzerland.

Five years ago, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and the Alaska university’s museum, acting on behalf of the 1,300 Eskimos who now live on St. Lawrence, began demanding that the remains be returned.

Swiss archeologist Hans-Georg Bandi, who excavated the burial sites on St. Lawrence in 1972-73 in cooperation with the University of Alaska, finally agreed. The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs came up with the funds to pay for shipping the boxes back to Alaska.

After the museum examines and catalogues the contents of the boxes, the remains will be turned over to tribal elders in two tiny villages on the island. And then the journey will come to an end when the bones--consisting mostly of skulls--are returned to the soil of St. Lawrence.

“The people there are overjoyed,” said Mike Lewis, archeology collections manager for the university’s museum. The Eskimos who live on the island did not even know what had become of the remains until notified a few months ago by Lewis that they would be coming home from Switzerland.

Lewis has been aggressively pursuing other artifacts removed from Alaskan graves by archeologists, but this is the first time that he has succeeded on an international scale. His effort here has special meaning for him. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the early inhabitants of St. Lawrence.

“St. Lawrence Island occupies a unique geographical position in that it’s midway between Siberia and Alaska,” Lewis said. “All our theories about human origins in North America deal with people crossing the Bering Strait, and here is a place in the middle.”

More than 10,000 years ago, when the first humans followed caribou and moose across a wide coastal plain that linked the two continents, what is now St. Lawrence Island was a mountain range in their path. As a result, the island is “probably the most thoroughly excavated site in Alaska,” Lewis said.

It is one of the few remnants left of the land bridge, which was submerged when warming weather melted huge ice sheets and caused the sea level to rise.

No one has found any evidence that St. Lawrence was inhabited during the great migration that peopled North America thousands of years ago, but there is abundant evidence that Eskimos have lived on the island on and off for many years. Lewis believes the remains of the people excavated by Bandi were Siberian Eskimos who journeyed to St. Lawrence to hunt seals and walruses.

“I believe St. Lawrence was not a permanent home for these people,” he said.

So they came, over hundreds of years, and they built shelters to protect themselves from the cold. After they returned to Siberia, the dwellings slowly decayed, and eventually others came and built temporary homes in the same area. In time, the site of the ancient settlements became a mound of dirt 20 feet high that was rich with artifacts.

Archeologists from around the world went to St. Lawrence to study the area, hoping to learn more about the first Americans. Hundreds of thousands of artifacts were removed, often without the knowledge of current residents, and were scattered around the globe.

Many, no doubt, are lost forever. But Lewis is tracking down all that he can.