Tile Eskimo could not bury their dead in the <*;round, which 
was perpetually frozen a few inches below the surface. In the west- 
ern ami eastern Arctic they generally covered the corpse with logs 
or stonesA but over a large i>art of the central Arctic they left the 
body unprotected except by its covering of skins, beside a man 
they laid his hunting equipment, beside a woman her sewing tools, 
tliat the souls of these objects might still serve their owners in 
the afterlife. Widows, widowei’S, and all wlio handled a coiqDse 
incurred a number of temporary taboos, but the mourners, unlike 
most Indians, neither mutilated themselves nor manifested their 
grief in other extravagant ways. 
The Eskimo of eastern Canada and I.abrador have been in 
contact with Euro])eans for more than two hundred years, and those 
of the ^Mackenzie delta for more than a hundred, whereas the 
bands that live along the Arctic coast between that delta and the 
Magnetic Pole remained almost uninfluenced until the twentieth 
century. To-day every inhabited region in the Arctic and sub-Arctic 
is exploited by European fur-traders. Bows and arrows have yielded 
to firearms; tools of bone, ivory, stone, and native coiiper to tools 
of steel; and clay or stone cooking pots to kettles and pots of iron or 
aluminium. The kayak and the naiiok have disappeared completely 
from many districts, for the hunting of whales has ceased and sealing 
and walrus-hunting, except with rifles from the edge of the ice, 
are on the decline. Skin tents are rapidly giving way to cloth tents, 
not so much because the latter are lighter and easier to transport as 
because firearms have diminished the number of caribou, and trap- 
ping leaves the natives but a short period in which to hunt either 
caribou or seals. Partly for the same reasons, and partly from a 
misguidefl imitation of Euro]ieans, many Eskimo now wear woollen 
underclothing and eyen the complete European costume, although 
their earlier garments of loosely fitting caribou fur were more pic- 
turesque and hygienic, and offered greater protection against the 
intense cold. 
Very few Eskimo now hunt intensively during the winter 
months: instead they trap foxes, which are useless to them for either 
food or clothing. In order to maintain their families during that 
season they buy European food from the fur-traders, largely flour, 
1 Tlie platform burial praf^tisod in parf.s of Alaska may be post -European. 
