Whale Bone Alley

On the north shore of a treeless island in the Senyavin Strait, at the edge of the Bering Sea, two lines of giant bones run along the beach for about half a kilometre: skulls of bowhead whales set into the ground at regular intervals, and pairs of jawbones raised upright, once facing each other like arches. The Russian name, Kitovaya Alleya, translates simply as Whale Alley; the Yupik name of the island, Siqlluk, is usually explained as "meat storage".

The complex was found in 1976 by a team from the Institute of Ethnography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences led by Mikhail Chlenov, and was studied in detail in the following years; in 1990 the French Arctic explorer Jean Malaurie joined a first international expedition. The main alley is lined by fifteen groups of skulls, spaced roughly ten metres apart and wedged with stones, and by some thirty-four jawbones, of which only around a dozen still stand where they were placed. Inland from the middle of the alley a path of pebbles leads to a second area at the foot of the slope, a ring of boulders enclosing more than a hundred funnel-shaped pits up to two metres deep, some of which held whale meat and blubber, together with arrangements of bone and stone. All the bones belong to a single species, the bowhead whale, which still migrates past the island.

What the site was for is still debated. The Soviet researchers saw it as a sanctuary shared by several coastal communities, perhaps a place of initiation rites and contests of strength, which would imply a level of cooperation and social organisation unusual for Arctic hunters. Local Yupik tradition, as recorded in the 1970s, describes it as a place for butchering whales and storing meat, and holds that it was built not by their own ancestors but by another people. The alley is generally attributed to the late phase of the Punuk culture, with the original researchers dating it to the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries AD. Since 2011 it has been protected as a cultural heritage site of the Russian Federation.

Getting there

Yttygran Island lies off the south-eastern tip of the Chukotka Peninsula and has no permanent settlement; it is reached by boat. The nearest village on the mainland is Novoye Chaplino, about 19 km away, and the district centre of Provideniya is about 39 km away. The nearest airport is Provideniya Bay (PVS), about 41 km away.