Old Bering Sea

Subsequent discoveries from 1925 to 1940 occurred within archaeological excavations mostly on St. Lawrence Island,[5] and is renowned for its richly carved winged objects, employed as counterweights on atlatls (throwing boards).

OBS sites are common on all the coasts of St. Lawrence Island, and the Diomedes; however, only isolated finds are known from the mainland of North America, at Barrow, Point Hope, Cape Espenberg and Golovnin Bay, within eastern Norton Sound.

[citation needed] Several phases of the linear and circle and dot Old Bering Sea style was formally defined by Henry Collins in 1937 on the basis of his extensive excavations at the mound sites of Mayughaaq in the vicinity of Gambell, Alaska, at the northwestern cape of St. Lawrence Island.

[8] A small Okvik site, the Hillside locality, lies above the Mayughaaq mound and contains five stone slab houses reasonably well dated to 200 to 400 AD.

[citation needed] The sites containing Old Bering Sea objects are typically large mounds and middens or cemeteries with hundreds of graves, often framed by bowhead whale mandibles and floored with wooden planks, hewn out of driftwood.