282  SMITHSONIAN    MISCELLANEOUS    COLLECTIONS  VOL.    96 
eastern  Asia  and  America.  In  so  doing  we  have  been  concerned  more 
with  such  architectural  features  as  wall  and  roof  structures,  platform 
arrangement  and  entrance,  rather  than  with  the  shape  of  the  house 
itself.  But  since  considerable  emphasis  has  been  placed  on  this  feature 
in  previous  discussions  of  the  problem,  it  may  be  well  to  consider 
it  here  briefly  from  the  standpoint  of  the  archeological  finds. 
Thalbitzer  (1914,  p.  360)  has  recognized  three  forms  of  perma- 
nent Eskimo  dwellings:  "(i)  the  roundish,  dome-shaped  type,  with 
whale-bone  as  material,  (2)  a  rectangular  type,  in  which  the  material 
consists  of  wood,  stones,  and  turf;  (3)  and  a  pear-shaped  house, 
mainly  built  of  stones  and  turf."  Thalbitzer  points  out  that  two  of 
these  types,  the  domed  and  the  rectangular,  are  found  both  in  the 
east  and  the  west :  the  small  whale  bone  houses  of  northeastern  Si- 
beria with  domed  roof  and  roughly  circular  outline  were  related  to 
houses  of  similar  shape  in  the  east,  and  the  Point  Barrow  house  to 
the  houses  of  South  Greenland  and  Ammassalik.  The  third  type, 
the  pear-shaped  house  typical  of  the  Polar  Eskimo,-  was  supposed  to 
have  been  derived  from  the  Mackenzie  house. 
Steensby,  on  the  other  hand,  grouped  the  eastern  rectangular  and 
pear-shaped  houses  together,  and  derived  them  both  from  the  Point 
Barrow  house  (1916,  p.  191). 
It  will  be  observed  that  both  of  these  writers  have  recognized  the 
significant  fact  that  the  Point  Barrow  house  was  related  to  certain 
of  the  Eastern  houses,  even  though,  as  we  have  seen,  the  Mackenzie 
house  has  affiliations  only  to  the  southward  of  Bering  Strait.  The 
apparently  conflicting  views  of  Thalbitzer  and  Steensby  with  regard 
to  the  affinities  of  the  Point  Barrow  house  are  in  considerable  measure 
reconciled  as  a  result  of  Mathiassen's  investigations,  which  have  shown 
that  the  ancestral  form  of  house  in  the  east  was  the  whale  bone  house 
of  the  Thule  culture,  and  that  this  in  turn  was  probably  related  to 
the  Point  Barrow  house.  In  this  case  the  shapes  of  the  several  types 
of  houses  are  of  less  importance  than  the  structural  features  that  con- 
nect them ;  for  although  the  shapes  have  undergone  considerable 
change  since  the  time  of  the  Thule  culture,  the  fundamental  princi- 
ples of  the  round  Thule  house  are  still  carried  out  even  in  such  widely 
separated  forms  as  the  rectangular  houses  of  the  Point  Barrow  and 
Ammassalik  Eskimos  and  the  pear-shaped  house  at  Smith  Sound. 
The  original  form  of  the  Thule  house  in  the  West  is  uncertain, 
Mathiassen,  in  tracing  its  distribution,  has  been  concerned  mainly 
with  the  material  from  which  it  was  constructed  and  its  round  shape, 
and  has  therefore  assumed  that  the  ruins  of  whale  bone  houses  found 
in  northeastern   Siberia  and  the  type  of  house  that   Nelson   found 
