457 



which seems to be a piece of a European iron hoop. The 

 blade has been wedged into a slit at the end of the haft and 

 secured with whalebone or sinew cord ; for this purpose two 

 holes have been bored in the rear corner of the blade within 

 the edge of the slit in the haft ; and the latter has two grooves 

 running right round and forming a bed for the lashing, each 

 covering one of the two holes in the blade. 



Doubt might arise as to whether this be a genuine Eskimo 

 knife. The blade is seemingly made of hoop iron, and the 

 form of the handle is, except for the pointed end, about like 

 the wooden haft of an European knife. The mere fact that the 

 haft is of wood seems in itself a suspicious circumstance. On 

 this very ground Solberg^ cast doubt on the primitiveness 

 of a knife with a stone blade with a wooden haft, found by 

 the Nathorst Expedition in North East Greenland (now in the 

 Riksmuseum at Stockholm), urging that mens' stone knives with 

 wooden handles are never found in West Greenland. More- 

 over, as has been mentioned before (pag. 384), he sees traces of 

 European influence in the curious form of the stone knife, a 

 view which I endeavoured to combat by referring to the types 

 of knife among the Western Eskimo and the stereotyped ice- 

 knife common to all Eskimo tribes (cf. pag. 438 — 440). 



The western parallels will apply in this case as well. The 

 Eskimo of the West have from olden times used knives both 

 with bone hafts and wooden hafts. Boas^) gives instances 

 from the isolated Southampton Island in Hudson Bay actually 

 of snow-knives which have bone blades inserted in wooden 

 hafts. He mentions a similar form, but with bone haft, from 

 the West coast of Hudson Bay'): — "models of the ancient 

 form of snow-knife, which was similar to that of Southampton 

 Island. In one specimen, figured here, the joint between the 



>) Solberg 59 (Fig. 6). 



^) Boas ]1, 69, ßg. 91, b, с 



») Id. 94, flg. 138. 



