Frederica de Laguna and the Study of Pre-Contact Pictographs from Coastal Sites in Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound, Alaska

Abstract

In her book, Chugach Prehistory: The Archaeology of Prince William Sound, Alaska, Frederica de Laguna hypothesized that the pictographs of Prince William Sound “find their closest analogy in the Eskimo pictographs of Cook Inlet” (de Laguna 1956:109). Some 60 years after de Laguna conducted extensive surveys and recorded pre-contact pictographs from coastal sites in Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound, Baird (2003) completed analyses of two pictograph sites located in Lake Clark National Park and Preserve and compared these data to data collected from pictograph sites located along the shores of Prince William Sound. Although the imagery at the Lake Clark pictograph sites shows stylistic similarities to pictographs in Prince William Sound, there are notable differences between the pictograph assemblages and the physical structure and contents of the sites from these two regions.