RESEARCH IN ESKIMO CULTURE 1 79 



of merely temporary dwellings. The whole of the summer is generally 

 passed in one continued pursuit of game and fish ; and to look for old 

 implements or similar archeological remains in the Barren Grounds 

 would be worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. 



Study of Coastal Culture Along the Northwest 

 Passage Straits 



Again, we have the same difficulty, from the archeological point 

 of view, dowri on the coast, both at Hudson Bay and the straits along 

 the Northwest Passage, where the first Eskimo emigrants doubtless 

 used only snow huts, just as do the present inhabitants of these tracts. 

 All these coast dwellers do in reality resemble the inland tribes very 

 closely, both in their material and spiritual culture, and appear to 

 have settled on the coast only in comparatively recent times. All the 

 ruins now found on the coast date from an altogether different period, 

 and the implements there found are very much like the Alaskan type, 

 the result of many generations' adaptation to the sea as a source of 

 livelihood. 



It would be most interesting, then, if archeological finds could 

 be made on the coast — especially in the region of the Northwest 

 Passage — of such a character as to support and link up with the 

 material procured by the Fifth Thule Expedition, all of which points 

 to the Barren Grounds of Canada as the earliest home of the abo- 

 riginal Eskimos. 



Archeology the Tool for the Study of Cultures 



There is no denying that the surest means of ascertaining the 

 origin of Eskimo culture is that of archeological investigation. And 

 it is the more gratifying, then, to note that interest in such investi- 

 gations seems to have increased considerably of recent years, in the 

 United States and Canada as well as in Denmark. 



The investigations of Therkel Mathiassen on the Fifth Thule 

 Expedition showed that it is just in the field of archeological research 

 that important results can be obtained; for he demonstrated by his 

 excavations the existence of a widespread ancient form of culture, 

 the Thule type,^ in places which, at the time of their occupation^ 

 lay several meters lower than at the present day. Some of the im- 

 plement types here found were previously known from the northeast 

 coast of Greenland, and their kinship with finds from Southampton 

 Island had already been established, e.g. by Professor Franz Boas. 

 On the west coast of Greenland, also, similar types have been found; 

 here, however, the conditions under which they were found afforded 

 no means of determining their chronological relation to other finds. 



^Geogr. Rev., Vol. is, 1925, pp. 547-S49' 



