This driftwood and skin-covered summer igloo, ca 1900, on an island in the Bering Strait indicates a cool day, since the house is closed in with hides and furs. In July these would be removed and stored. For a few days each year the family occupied the wood platform floor open to the sun, elements and stars, and protected only by the outline of the exposed wood skeleton structure.
Langdon, Steven. The Native People of Alaska . Anchorage: Greatland Graphics, 2002. Lange, Ian. Ice Age Mammals of North America. Missoula: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 2002. Rennick, Penny (editor). Prehistoric Alaska. Anchorage: Alaska Geographic/The Hart Press, 1972. Shah, Monica (editor). Alaska Park Science. Anchorage: Alaska Geographic, 2009. architecture. However, it is the acts of shedding and adding the skin to expose the skeleton that differentiates this architecture from the skeleton and skin architecture of today. / In Beringia with its extremes of climate the skeletons would represent a kind of permanence, while the skins could be associated with transience. In clothing skins were layered then shed according to needs of warmth and breath-ability. In housing, similar skins layered or stretched over the man-built skeletal frame were shed during summer then repositioned for winter protection. It is skin and skeleton that represents the very essence of this ancient
Successive Inupiat families lived in wood, sod and stone igloos – large dwellings, appearing subterranean and hidden but entirely constructed above grade. Driftwood supplied interior beams and the end walls. On hot summer days some of the sod was removed, then rebuilt in the fall.
Inupiat stone house on Little Diomedes Island, ca 1900. The door is framed by ivory tusks. Dwellings like this were subterranean and multi-levelled with spaces high enough for standing. This house had likely stood unchanged for centuries.
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