716 W. Thalbitzer 



It is difficult to say, how far west from Greenland we must seek 

 for the nearest home-place for the use of these and other archaic 

 objects; they may possibly have been used in earlier times nearer 

 the Davis Strait than we now can find traces of them. Just as the 

 masks are still preserved on Baffin Land, most of the other features 

 may have existed at an earlier period both in the regions round 

 Hudson Bay and further east and west. In any case the absence of 

 these few implements from the other parts of Greenland and the 

 central Eskimo regions cannot entitle us to characterize the Ammas- 

 salik culture and the culture of the remainder of East Greenland as 

 alien to Greenland. To regard these and several special features in 

 the culture of the Ammassalikers as archaisms can quite well be 

 reconciled with the theory of an old-time migration from the central 

 regions to this part of Greenland, but it must be confessed that this 

 suggests nothing as to whether these features (and the group of 

 people with them) have come there from the north or the south 

 round the land. A solution of this latter problem, so far as the 

 Ammassalikers are concerned, can hardly be reached with any ap- 

 proximation to probability, if we take these archaic features separate- 

 ly without connection with the cultural complex in which they 

 have actually been united. As we shall see in the following section, 

 which brings together the "results", they belong to a long series of 

 implements used by the Ammassalikers, which are common to 

 all the Greenlanders, even indeed characteristic of the Greenland 

 culture. 



I believe, therefore, that I am able to maintain the view, which 

 I set forth at once after my investigation in 1909 of the Amdrup 

 collection, namely, that the culture of the Greenlanders is homo- 

 geneous. The present local variations, which are observed from 

 district to district in Greenland, are unessential, but their existence 

 must be explained differently, partly as archaisms, partly as new 

 inventions. I have already shown earlier, that the Greenland types 

 of implements agree in the main with those of the existing Eskimo 

 in the northern and western part of Hudson Bay (pp. 329—330). 

 This ethnographical agreement strengthens the probability, that this 

 region — more closely determined by such names as Southampton 

 Island, Repulse Baj^ Melville Peninsula, Iglulik^) — was the original 

 home of the Greenlanders, from which they have migrated directly 

 northwards to end in Greenland. But this does not mean and was 



') I have made an indiscriminate selection of the names most often mentioned 

 in connection with the discovery of implements which to a remarkable degree 

 agree both in type and details with the Greenlandic. Sec my papers (1910) 

 and 1911. 



