336 



at Copenhagen. Among the collections of the latter museum is 

 now included that of Amdrup from the southern districts of 

 North-East Greenland. 



I hope that the following description of the objects found 

 may, in part at least, contribute to elucidate the position of the 

 East Greenland types of implements in the Eskimo ethnology 

 as a whole. 



The objects of the Amdrup collection, which are pubhshed 

 here for the first time, exhibit the North East Greenlanders as 

 participators in the same extreme Arctic culture as that which 

 we know especially from the most northerly West Greenlanders 

 and from the Point Barrow Eskimo in Alaska. 



The particular correspondences between the North East 

 Greenlanders and the Point Barrow Eskimo which Ryder ^) 

 deemed himself, on the basis of his material from Scoresby 

 Sund, to have detected and proved, turn out partly to be 

 due to error (his fragment of a "throwing-stick" is not a 

 throwing-stick at all; cf. inv. Amdrup No. 99] and partly, in 

 my view, to have no signification beyond the fact that the two 

 cultures both have their seat high up in the arctic regions, 

 and have been evolved under the same natural conditions. 

 Thus there are no adequate grounds for assuming any special 

 relationship between these two Eskimo 'tribes', or a direct 

 immigration in olden times of the Point Barrow Eskimo to 

 East Greenland. Furthermore our knowledge of the past culture 

 of the Eskimo races which dwelt between these two remote 

 regions is far too slight to warrant such an assumption. 



There exists no connected account of the material culture 

 of the great group of Eskimo dwelling at about the same 

 latitude, around the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Still more 

 meagre is our knowledge of that extinct Eskimo culture of which 



^) Ryder, Meddelelser om Grønland. Vol. 17, 343. 



