The Northwest Coast of North America as the Main Route from Beringia to the New World: The Evidence of Mythology

The Northwest Coast of North America as the Main Route from Beringia to the New World: The Evidence of Mythology

doi:10.17746/1563-0110.2025.53.2.115-125

Y.E. Berezkin
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, Universitetskaya nab. 3, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia

Data on the distribution of folklore and mythological motifs in the New World are analyzed. Their areas agree with the idea that early migrants moved along the Pacific coast of North America. The Columbian Plateau with the adjacent part of the coast could have been a hub whence people dispersed to the south, southeast, and east. The transfer of cultural elements along the Mackenzie Corridor is supported neither by the distribution of mythological episodes and images nor by archaeological evidence (the latter suggests an oppositely directed migration in the Terminal Pleistocene—from the main territory of the U.S. to Alaska). North American and South American narrative episodes and mythological motifs are separated by a huge geographic gap: Many migrant populations seem to have rapidly reached South America, leaving certain groups behind. While in America distribution areas of motifs follow recognizable patterns, in the Old World the same motifs are scattered from Europe to the Pacific, which may attest to the heterogeneity of the Beringian population immediately before the migration to the New World. Besides the main (early) episode of peopling, data on the areal distribution of motifs reveal three or four later episodes.

Keywords: Peopling of America, Beringia, Mackenzie Corridor, Northwest Coast, Columbia Plateau, comparative mythology