492 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 



The reason why the inland Eskimos occupied this environmental 

 niche in the Arctic seems to be one of choice, reaching far back into 

 antiquity. The writer concurs with Larsen and Rainey's ( 1948, p. 36) 

 opinion that the cultural difference between the coastal and inland 

 Eskimos "is apparently deeply rooted." A summation of the archeo- 

 logical differences and resemblances between these two economically 

 divergent cultures awaits analysis. The matter of geographic condi- 

 tions and their impress upon the cultural scheme of a people does not 

 seem resolvable in terms other than those involving the interaction 

 of organism and environment. Pursuant to our theme, Sauer (1944, 

 p. 529) remarked, "A given environment offers a determinable range 

 of options to a given cultural group, but this range, for the same area, 

 may be quite different for another culture." In other words, as Fred- 

 rik Barth (1950, p. 338) has said, "It is . . . possible for a group of 

 people to exploit only a small part of the total available food source, 

 as clam diggers or deer hunters, who may be as limited and specialized 

 in their food habits as are most mammalian species." But the given 

 environment here, the inland Arctic, is one of the last places in the 

 world to find anything resembling a wide range of options for habi- 

 tation. This is one of the areas of marginal cultural survival, whose 

 occupants were perforce dependent almost wholly upon herbivorous 

 mammals in their hunting-foraging existence. In fact, the natives 

 in late prehistoric and historic times at least, were dependent to a 

 large extent upon a single species of mammals, the caribou. 



How the factors of ecological succession, an orderly set of changes 

 from one kind of habitat to another, affected primitive man in the 

 Arctic, we do not know at present. These changes, presumably rather 

 slow, are continually taking place in the environment. Even slight 

 differences in climate may have broadly reaching effects in the vege- 

 tation of a habitat. This in turn may influence the animal life. Man 

 might survive the situation, or depart. Elton (1939, p. 156) makes a 

 highly suggestive statement : "It seems highly probable, although dif- 

 ficult in the present state of our knowledge to prove conclusively, that 

 many animals migrate on a large scale in order to get away from a 

 particular place rather than to go towards anywhere in particular." 



It is difficult to appraise the societal basis of the bands of inland 

 Eskimos in the manner described for other cultures by Julian Steward 

 (1936), because the people are gone, and with them, the needed infor- 

 mation. Certainly inferences can be made, but these cannot be sub- 

 stituted for facts. We may still be able to extract some ethnological 

 data from the present-day Killiks, who are supposedly the descend- 

 ants of the original Nunatagmiuts. Some information may be ob- 

 tained relevant to the social problems of these people from the bands 

 of inland Eskimos still living on the south side of the Brooks Range. 



