ETHNOLOGY OF ARCTIC AMERICA 



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sians introduced a flood of European beads among the Chukchis, 

 who in turn traded them on to the Eskimos. By using the ruins of 

 this last period as a datum line and measuring the amount of soil 

 that has since accumulated on top of them, we may be able to esti- 

 mate, within a century or two, the ages of still older ruins found in 

 the same localities under similar conditions of topography and soil. 



The discovery of the Thule 

 culture raises other problems be- 

 sides that of its antiquity. Do all 

 the ruins that have been recorded 

 from the now uninhabited northern 

 archipelago by the Franklin search 

 parties and later explorers date 

 from this Thule period, or are many 

 of them later and a few, perhaps, 

 earlier? As yet almost no archeolog- 

 ical work has been done in the vast 

 region that stretches from the 

 Alaska-Canada boundary to the 

 magnetic pole. Again, were the 

 Eskimo migrations of the tenth and 

 eleventh centuries that brought 

 about the destruction of the old 

 Norse colonies in Greenland directly 

 connected with the disappearance 

 of the Thule culture in Hudson 

 Bay? In what region did the Thule 

 culture first arise, and was it car- 

 ried from west to east or from east 

 to west by migrating tribes, or did 

 it slowly permeate from one dis- 

 trict to the next? Finally, did it 

 extend to the southward — to the 

 Yukon delta and the Siberian coast 

 on the one side and round the shores of the Labrador Peninsula on 

 the other? 



Fig. 2 — Bone harpoon heads from Coats 

 Island (lower, a, and upper) and Southampton 

 Island (lower, 6), with narrow, rectilinear 

 sockets, probably representing the Cape Dorset 

 culture. Half natural size. 



The Cape Dorset Culture 



Now, in both these regions, in Hudson Strait and in Bering Sea, 

 other ancient cultures have recently been unearthed. At Cape 

 Dorset in the south of Baffin Island, and on Coats, Mansel, and 

 Southampton Islands at the entrance to Hudson Bay, the ruined 

 stone houses contain remains, not only of the Thule culture but of 

 another very different that shows strong marks of Indian influence. 

 The center of this "Cape Dorset" culture, as it has been tentatively 



