An Archaeological Reconnaissance of the Middle and Lower Yukon Valley, Alaska

During the summer of 1935, the University of Pennsylvania Museum sponsored an archaeological and geological survey of the middle and lower Yukon valley, Alaska. The work was financed through the generosity of the National Research Council and the American Philosophical Society. The party consisted of: Dr. A. J. Eardley, Department of Geology, University of Michigan; Mr. Kenneth Gorton, a student of geology at the same institution; Mr. Norman Reynolds, a student of anthropology at the University of Washington; and the writer.The principal object of the expedition was to investigate the possibilities of finding ancient human remains in the Yukon valley. The discoveries of ancient artifacts (belonging to the so-called Folsom culture) in association with bones of extinct animals, show that human beings lived on the southern High Plains east of the Rockies at the end of the Pleistocene or during the early post-Pleistocene.