KEEPING WARM 
daunting realm, life must have been an 
excruciatingly difficult struggle for 
mere survival. The people of the Arctic 
Small Tool Tradition, presumed to be 
descendants of the Eskaleuts, neverthe- 
less spread eastward from Alaska about 
5,000 years ago, and within a span of 
roughly a thousand years occupied the 
Arctic all the way north to Ellesmere 
Island and east to East Greenland. They 
lived year-round in small tents, which 
they probably could not heat because 
they apparently did not have oil lamps. 
They lacked the toggle harpoon so es- 
sential for successful sea mammal hunt- 
ing. They probably had neither boats 
nor dog teams. Yet somehow they per- 
sisted, a few thousand people scattered 
across the immensity of the Arctic, lead- 
ing a life so hard that later Eskimo 
cultures appear positively luxurious by 
comparison. 
From these people of the Arctic 
Small Tool Tradition other cultures 
evolved — the pre-Dorset and, about 800 
b.c., the Dorset culture, which spread 
from its core area in northern Hudson 
Bay and Foxe Basin, to northern Elles- 
mere Island, west to Victoria Island, and 
south to Newfoundland. The culture of 
the Dorset people was distinctly Eski- 
moan. They had more elaborate tools 
and hunting implements and a way of 
life much better suited to the Arctic 
than that of their predecessors. But the 
Eskimos’ cold-adapted culture did not 
reach a state of near perfection until the 
arrival of the so-called Thule culture 
people, who moved eastward from 
Alaska about a.d. 800 and within less 
than 200 years spread across most of the 
North American Arctic, displacing or 
absorbing the Dorset people. 
Superb sea mammal hunters, Thule 
culture Eskimos pursued and killed ev- 
erything from the small ringed seal to 
the giant bowhead whale and, according 
to archeologist Robert McGhee of Can- 
ada’s National Museum of Man, they 
had evolved “a technology more com- 
plex than that of any other preindustrial 
society, which allowed not only an eco- 
nomically efficient but also comfortable 
way of life throughout arctic North 
America.” These Eskimos invented, per- 
fected, and passed on to the Eskimos of 
historic times such a plethora of special- 
ized tools and hunting equipment that 
the late James A. Ford of the American 
Museum of Natural History described 
them as “gadget burdened.” 
This is the more amazing because not 
Caribou skins are spread hair-down 
on the ground to dry, left. The 
Eskimo woman, right, is cleaning 
a caribou skin, preparatory to making 
it into a parka. Bannock is baking 
over the seal oil lamp. 
only was their land exceedingly cold, 
hostile, and barren, it was also poor in 
those raw materials most societies have 
found essential. Metal was rare: meteor- 
itic iron, brittle and hard to work, was 
found in the Cape York region of north- 
west Greenland and native copper in 
a few areas of the central Canadian 
Arctic. Driftwood was abundant along 
Alaska’s coast and east past the Mac- 
kenzie River delta; it was rare in the 
eastern Arctic and virtually nonexistent 
in the central Arctic. That left stone, ice, 
snow, and sod as the most readily avail- 
able and most widely used materials 
that the land and sea provided. Infi- 
nitely more important to the Eskimos 
were the materials they obtained from 
the animals they killed: bone, horn, 
baleen, antlers, teeth, ivory, furs, skins, 
sinews, and intestinal tissues. As 
Dionyse Settle, the Elizabethan chron- 
icler of explorer Martin Frobisher’s sec- 
ond expedition to Baffin Island, so 
shrewdly observed in 1577: “Those 
beastes, flesh, fishes, and fowles, which 
they kil, they are meate, drinke, apparel, 
houses, bedding, hose, shooes, thred, 
saile for their boates . . . and almost all 
their riches.” 
The earliest description of an Eskimo 
winter home comes from Frobisher’s 
third voyage to Baffin Island in 1578. 
George Best, one of Frobisher’s officers, 
wrote: “From the ground vpward they 
builde with whale bones, for lack of 
timber, which bending one ouer another, 
are handsomly compacted in the toppe 
togither, and are couered ouer with 
seales skinnes. . . 
The Eskimos inhabited similar win- 
ter houses when anthropologist Franz 
Boas lived with them on Baffin Island 
in 1883 and 1884. The base of a house 
was built of stones and whalebones (oc- 
casionally incorporating entire whale 
skulls). The rafters and framework 
were made of whale ribs and jawbones. 
These were covered with seal or walrus 
skins, then came a thick layer of dried 
heath, and the whole was securely 
wrapped with a second layer of animal 
44 
