230 
in north Alaska down to the twentieth century, they depended for 
their livelihood mainly on the great sea mammals, seals and, wherever 
they existed, whales and walruses. Many of their tools, weajioiis, and 
household objects differed from those used in the Arctic to-day, ami 
their stone houses are now unoccupied and falling into ruins. Yet 
their civilization (named Thule from the site in North (Ireenland 
where it was first discovered) must have lasted many centuries, for 
in Hudson l)ay the land has risen twelve or thirteen metres since they 
erected their earliest hoirses, and four or five metres since they built 
their latest a few generations before their discovery by Europeans. 
They were then swamped, apparently, by an invasion from the 
inland group of tribes, who spread over the whole coast-line as far 
as Coronation gulf. What set the inland tribes in motion, and the 
date when they first pushed outward, we do not know, but it seems 
not improbable that these disturbances in the Hudson Bay area and 
in Baffin island extended as far as Greenland, and caused that south- 
ward movement of Eskimo along the west coast of the island in the 
fourteenth century, which brought about the destruction of the more 
northei’ii colonies established by the Icelanders. In the isolation of 
Southampton island a modified form of the old Thule culture per- 
sisted right down to B)02, when all the inhabitants, except four chil- 
dren who had been adopted by a mainland tribe, perished through 
an infectious disease contracted from a whaling vessel. 
The third ancient division of the Canadian Eskimo is more 
doubtful. Various old ruins that stretch all the way from the north- 
west coast of Newfoundland to Ellesmere island, but which centre, 
apparently, around Hudson strait, have disclosed harpoon heads and 
other objects so unlike those normally associated with Thule remains 
that they surely denote either a very peculiar phase of that culture, 
or else a culture that is entirely distinct. ^ It resembles in a few 
points the culture of the extinct Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland, 
suggesting that the latter formerly inhabited the southern part of 
Labrador peninsula in such close proximity to the Eskimo that the 
t’wo peoples borrowed certain traits from each other. These, how- 
ever, are hypotheses that cannot be proved without further excava- 
tions in Labrador and the eastern Arctic. 
lit is known, tentatively, as the Dorset ctilture, from eape Dorset, ir the southwest corner of 
Baffin island where it was first fliscoveied. .Tenness, D.; “A New hNkimo Ciillure in Hudson Bav" ; 
Gcoft. Rev., vol. xv, No. 3, PP- 42.S-437 (July, 1925). 
