In 1939 and 1940 "one of the most startling and important finds of the century" (E.Stefansson) was made at Point Hope in Alaska, on the shores of the Bering Strait: an ancient city of about eight hundred houses, whose population had been larger than that of the modern city of Fairbanks, was discovered there, north of 68, and about 130 miles within the Arctic Circle.
"Ipiutak, as the location of this ancient city is called by the present Eskimos, must have been built before the Christian era; two thousand years is thought to be a conservative estimate of its age. The excavations have yielded beautiful ivory carvings unlike any known Eskimo or other American Indian culture of the northern regions. Fashioned of logs, the strange tombs gave up skeletons which stared up at the excavators with artificial eyeballs carved of ivory and inlaid with jet...
Numerous delicately made and engraved implements, also found in the graves, resembled some of those produced in North China two or three thousand years ago; others resemble carvings of the Ainu peoples in Northern Japan and the natives of the Amur River in Siberia...
WIC...quotes F.G. Rainey and his colleagues under the sponsorship of the American Museum of Natural History in New York; the results of their expedition were published in the anthropological papers of the museum.