PREHISTORIC CULTURE WAVES — JENNESS 389 



paratively modern, others very old. Some may have spread by slow 

 diffusion, just as tubular pipes and the tobacco {Nicotiana attenuata) 

 spread northward and reached the Eraser River only a short time be- 

 fore European occupation; others, again, may have been carried by 

 a mass migration. Two or three of them, however, notably the social 

 organization based on wealth, the talent for sculpture, and the music 

 (if this is confirmed) appear so deeply seated that almost involun- 

 tarily we associate them with some invading people, a people whose 

 original home lay somewhere, perhaps, around the Amur River. Yet 

 whether such an invasion ever did take place, and, if so, whether it 

 preceded or followed the Athapaskan invasion, must remain unsettled 

 until we know more of the archeology of the north Pacific coast of 

 America and also of northeastern Asia. 



Archeology has made more progress with the Eskimo, the other 

 people who appear to have been influenced by the Athapaskan inva- 

 sion. Here I should like to pay tribute to the magnificent work of 

 Danish scholars, not only the brilliant galaxy still living but the 

 long line of their predecessors, from Hans Egede in the eighteenth 

 century, Henry Rink in the nineteenth, to the last and in some re- 

 spects the greatest of them, the late Knud Rasmussen. Thanks largely 

 to Danish researches, supplemented by those of the Smithsonian In- 

 stitution in Washington, we know that behind the modern Eskimo 

 cultures there are three ancient ones, the Old Bering Sea in the west, 

 the Thule, which originated in the west but spread over Arctic America 

 to Greenland, and the Dorset, which was restricted to the eastern 

 Arctic. The origins of all three cultures still await the results of fur- 

 ther excavations in both the east and the west. Tentatively, however, 

 I should advance the following hypotheses, in the hope that they may 

 stimulate and guide the workers of the future. 



In spite of suggestions to the contrary, I still believe that the third 

 culture, the Dorset, is a genuine Eskimo one that has absorbed certain 

 Indian traits, rather than an Indian culture that has Eskimoized 

 itself, for the reason that we know of no Eskimo culture except the 

 Thule that could have influenced it, and many of its non-Indian 

 traits are equally non-Thule. Of special significance is the fact that 

 a few of these traits seem to hark back to a very early Eskimo stage, 

 because we have no parallels to them except in the far west. Collins ^° 

 has already pointed out that in the Dorset, as in the ancient Aleutian 

 and Old Bering Sea cultures of western Alaska, chipped stone imple- 

 ments immeasurably outnumber those implements of polished slate 

 that are so characteristic of Thule and later times; also that Dorset 

 art represents a fairly close aj^proach to Old Bering Sea style I. 



" ColUna, H. B., op. clt, p. S7S. 



