Ethnographical collections from East Greenland. 725 



neath has its ends folded together and the middle part greatly arched 

 Avheri blown up. But according to Johan Petersen this feature be- 

 longed originally to Ammassalik and from there spread southwards 

 to be adopted and imitated by the South Greenlanders. 



The Ammassalikers' dip-nets or basket -scoops for the caplin 

 (ammassät) fishery are apparently in agreement with those formerly- 

 used by the South Greenlanders (p. 468) and must have come from 

 the south. A curious thing is that the use of fish-hooks had not 

 reached so far north as Ammassalik. 



The cross-bows have reached Ammassalik from the south. 



The men's knives of the Ammassalikers, with a short double- 

 edged stone blade or a short, single -edged iron blade fixed in a 

 socket at the end of a haft, is characteristic of this locality, being a 

 type unknown elsewhere in Greenland or indeed anywhere within 

 the region of the East Eskimo. Those with stone-blade (figs. 204 a — 

 e) can be compared with the primitive stone blade knives of the 

 Point Barrow Eskimo ^), where the blade is fixed into a cleft in the 

 haft with a thong lashing round it. Those with an iron blade (figs. 

 182 and 184) are essentially of the same type, except that the blade 

 owing to the new kind of material is as a rule single-edged and has 

 two special characteristic features, the curved or (owing to wear) 

 concave cutting edge, which perhaps conceals an imitation of the 

 position of the blade in the "crooked knife" type (in such a case 

 this feature would be true Eskimoese and ancient knives of this type 

 have been found further north on the coast) and the distinct tang 

 which is sharply marked off from the outer part of the blade, 

 a characteristic that may have come from the south as copy of 

 European knives. — The long-blade hunting knife is presumably a 

 specialised form, in which two original types have become fused at 

 Ammassalik, namely, the double-edged knife with long blade (in 

 Alaska a lanceolate stone-blade) inserted into a wooden haft and the 

 common weapon of offence, the broad bone dagger (in Alaska made of 

 bear's bone in one piece without special haft)^). — Both these kinds 

 of knives (working and hunting knives) belong probably to the many 

 relicts of an old culture among the Ammassalikers, which has long 

 ago become extinct both in West Greenland and further north on 



^) Corresponding to the "first" and "second" classes of Murdoch (1892) pp. 152 — 



153, figs. 99 — 102, cf. fig. 145, which in East Greenland seem to he mixed. Cf. 



also Nelson (1899) pp. 80-81, PI. XXXVI a (especially figs. 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, all with 



iron blades). 

 -) These two types of knives are described by Murdoch (1892) pp. 152 — 153 (figs. 



103—104) and pp. 191—192 (figs. 174—175). Cf Nelson (1899) pp. 171 — 172, PI. 



LXV, fig. 3. 



