Ethnographical collections from East Greenland. 623 



ever easily seen that these patterns, at any rate some of them, are 

 also used by the Ammassalikers for their skin embroideries (cf. 

 pp. 527 — 530). The difference of material must naturally cause some 

 alterations and has probably also caused new designs to be made; 

 on the other hand, the fact that the ivory carvings are made by 

 the men while the women perform the sewing work seems to have 

 contributed less to any alteration of the style. The ornamental ideas 

 have repeated themselves in the two different kinds of material. — 

 The alternate spur design w^hich easily turns into a continuous zig- 

 zag line is in reality met with on the skin embroideries near Am- 

 massalik as elsewhere, e. g. in fig. 51 (p. 123) on the two triangular 

 needle-skins embroidered with dark on white ground. We have an 

 excellent example of the same pattern on the upper white border of 

 the sewing bag in fig. 50, where small transverse bars or spurs are 

 sewn with white on black ground. The same pattern may now 

 easily be traced again in the embroideries on the needle-skins in 

 figs. 249 — 250 and the moss-bags in figs. 253 — 254. — The concentric 

 circles are also frequently used as pattern in these East Greenland 

 skin embroideries. As the concentric circles in the ornamentation 

 of other peoples are often interpreted by experts as conventionalized 

 eyes, it may be of interest in this connection to recall the fact, that 

 the circular patterns just occur on the eye-shades and peaks of the 

 Ammassalikers (fig. 51 in the middle and figs. 316e, 320, S21a,b,d, 

 322), where they must undoubtedly be considered as representing the 

 human eye (cf. p. 120). — Now and then we find on the embroideries 

 a row of short lines which sometimes may resemble the dots on the 

 ivory objects, e. g. in fig. 253 e. — The rows of straight lines cross- 

 ing each other so as to form a kind of network or lattice are seen on 

 a needle-skin (fig. 249 b), on some of the moss-bags (figs. 253 b, 254 a, 

 cf. 192 b) and the cap uppermost to the right in fig. 51. This is prob- 

 ably an isolated pattern from East Greenland only; elsewhere it is used 

 in the Alaskan carvings as ground-work (shading) in figures of an- 

 imals, houses, boats etc., thus it also occurs in the large cross-orna- 

 mentation on the often-mentioned ivory comb found by Amdrup on 

 Dunholm ^). — The simple crosses found embroidered on several 

 of the skin-objects mentioned here are seen on the bottom of the skin 

 bag lowermost on the left in fig. 51 (cf. fig. 253 f) and on the side of 

 the bag in fig. 253 c; they are of course only conventional shapes 

 but I discovered that the Ammassalikers consider them as "flying birds" 

 (see p. 530) like the Alaskan Eskimo. — A prominent place among the 

 skin embroideries in East Greenland is taken by the wavy lines, 



^) Amdrup coll. no. 86 described by me (1909) pp. 466—475. 



