The Koniag were an important and little known population of American aboriginals. They were the occupants of Kodiak Island and the neighboring coast of southwest Alaska, at the time of European contact and constituted Hrdlicka's opinion, 'one of the largest native American groups of the time' (p. 19). The Koniag themselves, however, were relative latecomers to the island, arriving only 300-400 years before the Russians. They displaced a physically and culturally distinct population, the Pre-Koniag, which had occupied the island for perhaps the last 2000 years (pp.320-322). This monograph is divided into 4 parts. The first (pp. 9-92) reviews the ethnohistorical literature, principally Russian, and presents a basic descriptive ethnography based on the observations of Europeans in contact with the Koniag from the discovery of the island in 1763, to those of visitors of the mid 19th century. The second part (pp. 93-134) is a brief account of Hrdlicka's archaeological surveys of Kodiak and the neighboring area. The third part and the bulk of the book (pp. 135-352) is an almost day-by-day account of his archaeological work on the island. It is well illustrated but is little more than field notes and yearly summaries. The archaeological evidence remains largely unanalyzed (see 2:Heizer), and the cultural context of this material is not clear. The fourth part (pp. 353-434) concerns the physical anthropology of the Koniag and Pre-Koniag. It includes measurements of the full-blooded Koniag and the excavated skeletons. The skeletal remains are compared with American whites (as a standard), and Eskimos, Alutes, and Alaskan Indians in order to determine racial affiliations. Hrdlicka concludes that the Koniag are 'an anthropologically distinct unit widely different in many respects from the Eskimo, considerably closer to yet somewhat distinct from the Alutes' (p. 394). He concludes that the Pre-Koniag were most likely part of the larger Algonquin branch of the American natives. Two appendices covering stone and bone artifacts (pp. 434-474) and the archaeological remains of plant and animal life (pp. 475-481) are also included. The ethnohistorical section is probably the most valuable part of the source in terms of providing a description of a living culture.
Notes
Cited in Traditional Health and Healing Practices of the Alaska Natives: based on early sources by Robert Fortuine, 1986.