204 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 18, 1916 



INTRODUCTION 



^ The ^Eskimo present the unique spectacle of a people extending 

 for five thousand miles across the entire northern border of a con 

 tinent, living under the same climatic environment, and practically 

 homogeneous throughout in customs and speech. Consequently, 

 they offer a problem which is not only sectional but general, and 

 any light which may be thrown upon their development, particu 

 larly the physical side, is of interest in connection with the general 

 problem of the relation of man to his environment. Although the 

 present investigation has been limited to local and racial com 

 parisons, the peculiar situation of the Eskimo may make the results 

 suggestive of the larger problem. 



In the following pages we have concerned ourselves chiefly with 

 the description of skeletal material from a hitherto little-studied 

 branch of this people, the Alaskan Eskimo. The collection includes 

 twenty-eight crania, male, female, adolescent, and infantile, and 

 three skeletons, brought down from Point Barrow, at the extreme 

 northern point of Alaska, in 1898 by E. A. Mcllhenny. The Point 

 Barrow Eskimo, as will be remembered from Murdoch s 1 report, 

 possess the simple Arctic culture characteristic of the more isolated 

 tribes of the central and eastern Eskimo, and are as yet unin 

 fluenced by an intermixture of Indian customs and mythology, as 

 is the case with the more southerly Alaskan Eskimo tribes. Their 

 isolation has also preserved the purity of their physical type. The 

 only possibilities of intermixture are with the Athapascan tribes of 

 the interior, who are very rarely met with on spring hunting trips 

 into the interior, and from whom they are separated by inland 

 Eskimo tribes, and with the white whalers, whose influence, as 

 Stefansson has shown, has been of such short duration that it has 

 not affected the native type. Furthermore, they are separated 

 from the Mackenzie river Eskimo, the next division to the east, 

 by some two hundred miles of uninhabited coast line, and only 

 come in contact with them at infrequent intervals for trade at Barter 

 island, or on whaling trips. 



1 John Murdoch, &quot;Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition&quot; (Ninth 

 Annual Report Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 1-441. Washington, 1892). 



