 Other sources think that the name means "Temporarily Abandoned Bone Dwellings", a thought which has arisen due to puzzlement over the precise history of the settlement.The Chukchi who arrived in the area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found well preserved homes built by a culture which they had previously not encountered and about which they knew nothing, and it is speculated that the settlement might have been abandoned because the previous inhabitants died from some form of epidemic.Indeed, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld's expedition in the 1870s found a number of recently abandoned houses in the nearby village of Ryrkaypiy which were full of ivory carvings.