722 W. Thalbitzer 



houses were once in use there also and I imagine, that the still 

 occupied houses, in which the depth (from window to back wall) is 

 greater than the length of front or back wall, belong to a transi- 

 tional type from the originally small to the long-house type. Amdrup 

 has shown ^), that certain peculiarities in the houses of the north coast 

 are found again in some house-ruins at Ammassalik, namely, a niche 

 (store room) in the one side-wall of the house near the entrance and 

 a side-room (workshop) in the house passage ^); further he discovered 

 at the Skærgaard Peninsula in the northern part of the Ammassalik 

 district the characteristic observed in the more northern Depot Is- 

 land, that the graves were provided with a small side-room, in which 

 the weapons or instruments of the dead were deposited. Thus we 

 can perhaps see here traces of the dwellings of the northern im- 

 migrants in these features and in the small houses, which are now 

 only found as ruins at Ammassalik, whereas in the long-houses we 

 see the house-type, which has won its way in with immigrants 

 from the south. 



A feature of the long-houses, also coming from the south, is the 

 separation of the different families on the long platform by means 

 of suspended skins (talin), which in height reach the level of a sitting 

 person, and pillar -shaped wooden supports between each place, 

 which bear the long beams of the roof. 



A rudiment of the dome-shaped snow-houses of the arctic re- 

 gions may be seen in the diminutive snow-houses {ittewii]aq), which 

 the Ammassalikers build as shelter for their dogs in the severest 

 time of winter. 



The dogs themselves and the dog-sledges are a high-arctic feature. 

 Between Cape Farewell and Holstensborg on the west coast we find 

 at the present day neither dogs nor sledges, and the same applies to 

 the southernmost part of the east coast, for in the subarctic zone the 

 snow does not freeze so hard, that it is practicable to drive on sledges 

 over long distances. South Greenland is subarctic, still dogs and sled- 

 ges were used on the east side as far south as Tingmiarmiut (62° 

 32' N. lat.)2). The East Greenland dogs resemble those of North-West 

 Greenland and the harness used for them is very much the same at 

 both places. The sledges on the other hand have some special features 

 which distinguish them from those of the west coast. 



The winter seal-hunting on the ice, the necessary types of wea- 

 pons and the hunting methods distinguish the Ammassalikers from 



1) Amdrup (1909) pp. 318—319 and (1902) p. 241. 



-) The side-room in the house passage has probably rather been a kind of kitchen 



or small cooking space of the kind described by Glahn in the South Greenland 



houses; cf. Schultz-Lorentzen (1904) p. 310. 

 3) Holm (1883) p. 68, cf. (1888) p. 203, in this volume pp. 185-187. 



