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are presented by James VanStone in an organized synthesis that brings the careful description of everyday Alaskan Eskimo material culture into the twentieth century. It is most fitting that this job so well begun by Lantis should be equally well completed by VanStone, who is signally qualified by his own extensive experience with both historic and recent material culture of western Alaska. Appropriately enough, his own first independent Alaskan fieldwork was a survey of recent archaeological sites on Nunivak Island in 1952. The base of the work is the information collected by Lantis. But added to this are facts gleaned from, among other sources, the first detailed description of Nunivak and its people by Ivan Petroff, who visited the island for the eleventh U.S. census, in 1891; by George Byron Gordon, of what is now the University Museum, Philadelphia, who sojourned in 1905; by Edward Curtis, who wrote the first brief ethnographic account from his visit in 1927; by Henry B. Collins, Jr., of the Smithsonian Institution, who with his colleague T. Dale Stewart measured heads and skulls there for much of the summer of the same year (and who recommended the island to Lantis); and by Hans Himmelheber, the German ethnographer, who visited the island three years before Lantis. The more than 100figures are principally drawings and field photographs by Lantis (some, but not all, of which have been published before), photographs of her collection now at the Museum of Anthropology, University of Kentucky; and several photographs of places and people by Himmelheber. Photographs are clear and printed on paper that reproduces very clearly. The descriptive text on the actual material is divided among ten sections, fairly traditional in their boundaries, which include details of use and behavior as well as artifact form and technology. These treatments extend, for instance, to variation in kayak bow and stern sections between individual makers, as well as in various construction details; to food collection and methods of preparation; specific means for taking fish; to the making of birdskin parkas and identification by bird type of categories of people who might wear them. These are not simple restatements of standard anthropological knowledge that might apply anywhere in the Yuit or Inuit world, or even anywhere in Alaska. On the one hand, Nunivak Island represents a regional subdivision of western Eskimo culture in its own right; the people are, for instance, far enough outside the regular communication network of even the adjacent mainland and Nelson Island that their speech has been classed by some linguists as a separate dialect of Yupik. Behavior follows the same pattern, in particular with regard to women, whose traditional modes are shown to have departed more from the practices of their mainland re tives than did those of the men: they split salmon diffierently, they made boots by a different pattern, their needle cases were distinctive, they used grass for more purposes. One item especially welcome to this reader is an unambiguous description,  with  photographs,  of  the  construction of semisubterranean dwellings with a cribbed roof structure, rather than one supported by simple post and beams. Excavations elsewhere in southwestern Alaska had made it seem necessary that the former be the pattern, for repeatedly the four central support posts were found set so closely toward the corners that a simple beam construction could be trusted to carry the weight of a sod roof only by inhabitants totally oblivious of constant danger. And yet ethnographers including James VanStone -had continued to refer to “four-post central” construction and to insist that in family dwellings the sod roofs were always laid only on simple crossbeams. The photographs and description of Lantis finally confirm the excavations, showing roofs built up by cribbing from four heavy posts set well out toward the corners. Added to the descriptive presentation are valuable conclusions in which VanStone places Nunivak Island within the context of southwestern Alaskan Eskimo culture. A lengthy list of culture elements derived from the notes of Lantis, supplemented by inforREVIEWS / 315

Spirit of the Barrens: Diary of an Arctic Journey, a video by Peter Harmathy