Alaska Journal of Anthropology vol. 6, no. 1 & 2 (2008) 171 FISHTAILS, ANCESTORS, AND OLD ISLANDERS: CHIRIKOF ISLAND, THE ALASKA PENINSULA, AND THE DYNAMICS OF WESTERN ALASKA PREHISTORY Herbert D. G. Maschner Department of Anthropology, Idaho State University, 921 S. 8th Avenue, Stop 8005, Pocatello, ID 83209-8005; maschner@isu.edu ABSTRACT William Workman’s 1962 Chirikof Island archaeological survey, and his 1,020-page master’s thesis based on the collections from that expedition, marks a landslide event in the archaeology of the Gulf of Alaska. His interpretations and speculations about the cultures, behaviors, and regional connec- tions that generated that unique collection have been tested and shown to be highly consistent with what is now known of the area over forty years later. His discussion of the concave-based endblades, now called “fshtails,” and his initial descriptions of the four-thousand-year-old complex he named “Old Islanders,” has in the last ffteen years become critical to our understanding of Peninsula Aleut ethnogenesis. Equally poignant, his early 1990s publication on the Kachemak ceremonial complex was the frst in-depth treatment of religious beliefs characteristic of any archaeological culture in the western Arctic. Together, these two studies have set the stage for a reformulation of western Alaska prehistory, one that is dynamic, complex, and interconnected from the Western Gulf of Alaska to the Chukchi Sea and beyond. : archaeology, William Workman, cultural interactions INTRODUCTION In 1962, William Workman and Donald Clark spent eleven isolated days on Chirikof Island, undertaking an archaeological reconnaissance in one of the more remote landscapes in the central Gulf of Alaska region (Fig. 1). In the context of fnding twenty-four sites (four were already known from an earlier expedition), they made extensive surface collections and completed a number of small ex- cavations. Te results of this foray are entombed in one of the largest (1,020 pages) archaeological master’s theses ever produced, titled “Contributions to the Prehistory of Chirikof Island, Southwestern Alaska” (Workman 1969); it was also the basis of a widely distributed but unpublished manuscript on the Old Islanders complex from Chirikof Island (Workman 1984). Working with no ability to date most of the material, Workman presents one of the clas- sic comparative assessments of arctic archaeology, relying on dispersed and other poorly dated excavations from the Aleutians to Point Hope to place the Chirikof materials in a regional and temporal context. Fourteen intensive feld seasons on the western Alaska Peninsula now allow us to place much of the Chirikof materials in a tempo- ral and regional context, but also demonstrate clearly that Workman’s conjectures were largely correct. Moreover, the seminal Chirikof study, at the boundary between Kodiak and the western Gulf of Alaska, allows the cre- ation of a North Pacifc and western Alaska archaeology