Page:Archæology of the Central Eskimos.djvu/21

During my first visit to Repulse Bay the manager of the local station of the Hudson's Bay Company, Captain G. Cleveland, told me that there were ruins of permanent winter houses at Naujan, a few kilometres east of the Station. As the Eskimos who now live in the country, the Aivilik Eskimos, know no other type of winter house than the snow house, this made us very interested indeed and, on the 22nd December 1921, I visited the place for the first time together with Birket-Smith. We were at once struck by the fact that the ruins lay so high up and so far removed from the sea; the Eskimos brought us a small collection of objects found by digging among these houses, and these objects seemed to indicate the Stone Age; furthermore, this settlement lay conveniently near to the station, from which the collections could be sent home; it was all these circumstances which caused me to choose Naujan as the site of the first extensive excavations.

Just after returning from the sledge journey to Admiralty Inlet in the spring of 1922 I was able to commence excavating at Naujan on June 14th; it was impossible for me to obtain any assistance from the local Eskimos, who were nearly all at Beach Point procuring winter supplies of meat and dog-feed, and of our own people none of them could be spared to help me at first; however, on July 8th Jacob Olsen, our Greenland interpreter, came to my assistance and was of great use to me until blood-poisoning in the finger compelled him to cease digging on June 30th. On the whole, excavating went on from June 14th until August 14th, interrupted only by a few days' visit to Aivilik. From June 14th to July 20th we lived at the trading station; after that time we lived in a tent at Naujan.

When I commenced the work on June 14th the Naujan Valley still had a wintry aspect; there was snow over the whole of the valley bottom; only the upper parts of the house walls jutted up out of the snow; the lake was covered with ice and the sea-ice was firm;