528 % ARCHEOLOGY 



eyes. My task is to give you, in a brief and summary way, an idea 

 of what we have gained from the most recent investigations in the 

 continent upon which we are now assembled, that old continent 

 which we, the children of another, have been accustomed to call the 

 New World. 



To begin with the North: it is too early to speak of archeology 

 here as a separate science. The discoveries which have been made 

 are the work of expeditions sent out for the solution of geographical 

 problems or for the accumulation of collections to serve for the study 

 of natural history or ethnography. Yet some facts of great historical 

 significance may be deduced from the objects, not at first sight 

 remarkable, which form the contents of the ancient graves of that 

 region. We are entitled to infer, in the first place, that the existence 

 founded upon the life of the Arctic fauna and adapted to it, that 

 of the Eskimo as they were first seen by Europeans, with all their 

 peculiar civilization, their extremely clever adaptation of the 

 wretched materials at their command to the making of weapons, 

 utensils, houses, boats, must have gone on in practically the same 

 form for a thousand years at least, and probably much longer. 

 Another fact of importance may be mentioned as the immediate 

 result of combined archeological and topographical expeditions, 

 especially those from Denmark and from Sweden and Norway. 

 It is that the migration of the Eskimo to Greenland must have gone 

 by way of Ellesmere Land and the northern coast of Greenland, down 

 the east coast, and thus to the west coast. If, now, we take with 

 this the statements of the Icelandic sagas that the first settlers in 

 Greenland found remains of the houses of the Skrallings, the 

 small race which about the year 1000 inhabited the coasts of Lab- 

 rador, Newfoundland, and Maine, and that it was some of these 

 same Skrallings who finally overthrew the important settlements 

 of the Icelanders in Greenland, two further noteworthy facts emerge: 

 that the Eskimo must, at a distant period, have spread southward 

 at least as far as the coast of Maine, and that in various waves of 

 migration, separated by intervals of time, they must have pressed 

 on by the far northern way already mentioned, as far as the western 

 coast of Greenland. 



To-day the northwest, with its deep-cut fjords, its streams abound- 

 ing in fish, and its wooded shores, is inhabited by a number of 

 tribes who differ considerably in language, but show a remarkable 

 similarity not only in their material civilization, but in their legends, 

 their social organization, their religious conceptions, and the artistic 

 productions based upon them. As to that which is the most distinct- 

 ive thing in this ethnographic group, the social structure and what 

 depends upon it, Professor Boas has recently shown that it really 

 represents quite a late type of development. The archeological 



