364 ANTHROPOLOGICAL SUKViiY IX ALASKA [KTH. ANN. 48 



Occasionally burials were made or dead bodies were left in old 

 houses. These remains, too. may prove of special value. 



11. Observations on both the living and the skeletal remains in 

 the western Eskimo area, supplemented by those on the northern 

 and northeastern Eskimo, are now ample enough to justify certain 

 generalizations. These are : 



a. Barring the Aleuts, who are Indian, the Eskimo throughout 

 belong somatologically to but one family, and this family appears 

 as a remarkably pure racial unit, somewhat admixed in the south 

 with the Aleut, on the western rivers with the Indian, and in the 

 east and a few spots elsewhere with recent white people. 



i. Within this family there is observable a considerable cranial 

 change, with moderate differences in nasal breadth, stature, and 

 color, but the general characteristics of the physiognomy, and of the 

 body and the skeleton, remain remarkably similar. 



c. The changes in the skull affect mainly the vault, which, in di- 

 mensions, ranges through all the intermediary grades from moder- 

 ately broad, short, and moderately high to pronouncedly narrow, 

 long, and high, and in form from moderately convex over the top to 

 markedly keel shaped. 



The distribution of skull form is somewhat irregular, but in gen- 

 eral the broader and shorter heads predominate in the Asiatic and 

 the southwestern and midwestern American portions of the Eskimo 

 region, while the longest and narrowest heads are those of parts of 

 the Seward Peninsula, and especially those from an isolated old 

 settlement near Barrow with those of Greenland (exclusive of the 

 Smith Sound), Baffin Land, and, judging from other data, also east- 

 ern Labrador. More or less transitional forms are found between 

 the two extremes, without there being anywhere a clear line of 

 demarcation. 



The breadth of the nose, too, averages highest in the Asiatic, Ber- 

 ing Sea, and the more southern Eskimo of the Alaska coast, the least 

 along the northern Arctic coast and in the northeast. The stature 

 is highest along the western Alaska rivers and parts of the coast, 

 least in Greenland and Labrador. 



The skin, while differing within but moderate limits, is apparently 

 lightest along parts (at least) of the northern Arctic. 



12. The whole distribution of the physical characteristics among 

 the Eskimo strongly suggests gradual changes — within the family 

 itself; and as the long, narrow, high skull with keeled dome, occur- 

 ring in a few limited localities in the wesi but principally in southern 

 Greenland and neighboring territories, appears to be the farthest 

 limit of the differentiation which finds no parallel in the neighboring 

 or other peoples, while the form found in northeastern Asia, the 



