426 ANNUAL REPORT SIVHTHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 



The archeological studies that have provided new insight into 

 Eskimo culture began with those of Jenness (1925, 1928) and 

 Mathiassen (1927) and have continued during the intervening years, 

 the latest comprehensive works being those of Holtved (1944) in 

 northwest Greenland and of De Laguna (1947) and Larsen and Kainey 

 (1948) in Alaska. Important ethnological studies have also been 

 made, and the same period has brought new information on the physi- 

 cal types of various modern and prehistoric Eskimo groups in Alaska 

 and Canada. Though the recent investigations have provided the first 

 factual data essential to an understanding of the problem of the 

 Eskimo, it is not to be supposed that the final answers are at hand. 

 For many parts of the American Arctic we still lack adequate infor- 

 mation, and the recent discoveries have sometimes complicated rather 

 than simplified the picture. In the following pages, after a brief 

 summary of recent archeological discoveries and their implications, 

 we shall attempt an over-all interpretation of the available evidence 

 relating to the origin and affinities of the Eskimo race type and 

 culture. 



PREHISTORIC ESKIMO CULTURES 



Thule. — Systematic Eskimo archeology began with the investiga- 

 tions of the Fifth Thule Expedition around Hudson Bay in 1922 

 and 1923 (Mathiassen, 1927). Excavating at old Eskimo sites north 

 and west of Hudson Bay, Mathiassen uncovered evidence of a pre- 

 historic culture that he called the Thule, which differed in many 

 respects from that of the Eskimos now living in the region. The 

 old Thule people lived along the seacoasts, in semisubterranean houses 

 of whalebones, stones, and turf during the winter and in conical tents 

 in summer. Unlike the modern Central Eskimos, the Thule people 

 were whale hunters; they also hunted the walrus, seal, polar bear, 

 and caribou. In material culture they differed markedly from the 

 Central tribes, being much closer to the Greenland and Alaskan Esld- 

 mos. So close, in fact, were the resemblances to northern Alaska that 

 Mathiassen was able to show that the Thule culture must have origi- 

 nated in the west, somewhere along the coasts of Alaska or Siberia 

 north of Bering Strait. Having flourished for some centuries, the 

 Thule culture disappeared from the Central regions, displaced and 

 partly absorbed by the ancestors of the present Central tribes who 

 moved from the interior out to the seacoasts. Meanwhile, the Thule 

 Eskimos had moved eastward to Smith Sound in northwest Green- 

 land. Excavations by Mathiassen, Larsen, and Holtved have traced 

 in considerable detail the stages of development of Greenland 

 Eskimo culture. 



In West Greenland, the Inugsuk, a late stage of Thule culture dating 

 from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was in direct contact 



