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remnants of an older culture which, after a locality outside the Central Eskimo territory, in North Greenland, we have called the Thule culture. Whereas the present day Central Eskimos live a very nomadic existence, with snow houses and tents as their only dwellings, with caribou hunting as their principal occupation, whilst the hunting of marine animals has, as far as most tribes are concerned, retired somewhat into the background, the Thule culture has to a much greater degree been connected with the coast, has been based upon the hunting of the big marine mammals, especially whales[1] and walruses, and has had permanent winter houses situated at the good hunting grounds; and in the implement technique of these two cultures we see great, fundamental differences.
An examination of the various finds will show that in the Naujan find we have a large, ancient find dating, from a geological point of view, from a rather limited, distant period of time; a find which, in every respect, gives the impression of being very homogeneous, with fixed types of implements and without later intermixtures; the contrasts between these types and those which we now find in use in Repulse Bay among the Aivilik Eskimos stand out very clearly. In the small finds from Aivilik and Chesterfield Inlet there are objects which bring them close to the Naujan find; in the grave finds from Naujan we seem to have the end of this epoch in these regions. All along the west coast of Hudson Bay and Fox Basin we can trace the ruins of this culture and see that in every case they lie higher than it would be reasonable to build them with the water at its present level.
In the old settlement finds from Qilalukan and Mitimatalik in northern Baffin Land we have, both from a geological and an archaeological point of view, a later stage of this culture; here we find the Naujan types blended with a few later forms, some of which display a further development or a degeneration of the old types; some parts of the finds (as for instance the small find from Button Point) have a strong local stamp. At Kuk, on Southampton Island, the oldest ruins seem to be contemporary with the Naujan settlement, and from here we can follow how, owing to isolation, there is a markedly special development, how communication with the mainland has been severed and how a peculiar, locally stamped culture has arisen which we find most highly developed among the Sadlermint, who died out in 1902. The small finds from Port Harrison and the Belcher Islands show that Thule types also occur on the west coast of Labra-
- ↑ Whaling must, of course, be pursued in open water, i. e. in summer, which is at the same time the best season for caribou hunting. Thus concentration upon whaling necessitates that caribou hunting is more or less neglected.
