PREHISTORIC CULTURE WAVES — JENNESS 391 



out to tlie coast of the eastern Arctic; for the Athapaskans them- 

 selves, as we have seen, must have crossed Bering Strait from Asia 

 before the Christian Era. 



Collins ^^ has already pointed out certain features in which the 

 Dorset Eskimo influenced later cultures in the eastern Canadian 

 Arctic and in Greenland. He has shown that the modern form of the 

 eastern harpoon head, with its bifurcated base and line holes on the 

 upper surface, is probably derived from a Dorset type; also that 

 Solberg's Stone Age culture in northwest Greenland represents a 

 mixture of Dorset and Thule elements. Even the physical charac- 

 teristics of the Greenland Eskimo may have been modified by Dorset 

 admixture, since Greenland Eskimo skulls (outside of Smith Soimd) 

 resemble those of the old Birnirk Eskimo in the western Arctic (who 

 were the immediate successors, if not the actual contemporaries of 

 the Old Bering Sea people) more than they do Thule skulls from 

 the eastern Arctic, or the skulls of Thule descendants in Smith Sound, 

 Southampton Island, and Barrow.^^ 



Let us turn our eyes again to the western Arctic, where Collins 

 has so brilliantly deciphered the Old Bering Sea culture and traced 

 its evolution, or devolution, down to modem times. The Birnirk 

 phase of Barrow appears in his sequence as the immediate successor 

 of the Old Bering Sea, marking the beginning of the Punuk culture. 

 It seems rather strange, however, that its characteristic harpoon 

 heads are made of bone instead of the usual ivory, and that they are 

 rarely if ever decorated. Like the later Thule-type harpoon heads 

 also present on St. Lawrence Island, they rest there uneasily as if 

 they were intruders and did not belong to the strict order of succes- 

 sion. Old Bering Sea, Punuk, and modem. One wonders, too, why 

 the Old Bering Sea art should have undergone a slow and gradual 

 modification on St. Lawrence Island all through Punuk times, cen- 

 tury after century, whereas at Barrow it vanished completely in the 

 Birnirk stage. 



Can it be that the St. Lawrence material is slightly misleading? 

 The Birnirk (and its first-born child the Thule) is perhaps not a 

 direct offspring of the Old Bering Sea, but both may be offspring 

 of some less advanced culture that flourished on the northeast coast 

 of Siberia around the mouths of the Kolyma and Indigirka Rivers. 

 From this region the hypothetical parent culture may have sent its 

 offspring eastward. One branch crossed over Bering Strait and 

 proceeded north along the Alaskan coast to Barrow, blazing a trail 

 that was followed by trading parties in later centuries ; it still main- 



" Collins, H. B., op. cit., pp. 315, 336. 



"Cf. Flscber-Moller, K., Skeletal remains of the cpntral Eskimos. Rep. 5th Thule 

 Exped., vol. 3, No. 1, 1937 ; and Skeletons from ancient Greenland graves. Medd. Gr0n- 

 land, vol. 119, No. 4, 1938. 



