72 THE POINT BARROW ESKIMO. 
language sufficiently to be used as the radical in compound words such 
as “tiba/xutika/kttne,” “I have a supply of tobacco.” There is no 
evidence that anything else was smoked before the introduction of 
tobacco, and no pipes seen or collected appear older than the time when 
we know them to have had tobacco.! 
HABITATIONS. 
The winter house (v’glu).—The permanent winter houses are built of 
wood? and thickly covered with clods of earth. Each house consists of 
a single room, nearly square, entered by an underground passage about 
25 feet long and 4 to 44 feet high. The sloping mound of earth which 
Grounpd Pian. 
Vy. 
Y 
4 
ee 
Y 
Yh 
Up TTTITTTTTTTTTTTIT Y Va 
VerTICAL SECTION. 
Fic. 9.—Plans of Eskimo winter house. 
covers the house, grading off insensibly to the level of the ground, gives 
the houses the appearance of being underground, especially as the land 
on which they stand is irregular and hilly. Without very careful 
measurements, which we were unable to make, it is impossible to tell 
whether the floor is above or below the surface of the ground. It is 
certainly not very far either way. I am inclined to think that a space 
'Since the above was written, the word for pipe, “‘kuinyz,”’ has been found to be of Siberian origin. 
See the writer's article ‘On the Siberian origin of some customs of the Western Eskimos" (Amer- 
ican Anthropologist, vol. 1, pp. 325-336). 
2In some of the older houses, the ruins of which are still to be seen at the southwest end of the vil- 
lage of Utkiavwin, whales’ bones were used for timbers. Compare Lyon Journal, p. 171, where the 
winter huts at Iglulik are described as “entirely constructed of the bones of whales, unicorns, wal- 
ruses, and smaller animals,'' with the interstices filled with earth and moss. 
