THE Bering Strait region is the traditional gateway to America. Theory has had weary migrants wearing paths across its dried-up floor in glacial times and, later, paddling primitive craft in a determined search for a new world. The archeology of the region steadfastly refuses, however, to divulge the short-term sites of people on the move. It shows, rather, the slowly changing record of several groups of indigenous hunters and fishermen and their descendants, whose artifacts were specialized to a remarkable extent for the taking of food from the seas, streams, tundras, and forests, and whose interests were as local as the shores and river banks on which they dwelt. The sophistication of design in ancient flint work, and later in engraving, does not seem to reflect anxiety or instability such as might have been shown by dwellers in a hostile land. Moreover, the designs on opposite sides of the Strait, and also along the eastern sides of the two seas marked off by the Strait, have long paralleled one another, blending only in part. This is clearly seen in the sites that have emerged during the last three decades. We need not give up the search for evidence of the migration of small bands, or even of uneasy hordes; yet the emphasis can be, for a time, on the cultural stability of a Bering