Page:Archæology of the Central Eskimos.djvu/371

In the winter of 1902-3 died out one of the most interesting tribes of Central Eskimos, the Sadlermiut, the inhabitants of Southampton Island (Esk. Sadleq) (and Coats Island). Very few white men had been in contact with this tribe. The first to meet them was Capt. G. F. Lyon,^[1] who, while on his unsuccessful attempt to reach Repulse Bay in 1824, landed at several places on the south coast of Coats Island and had intercourse with the Eskimos there. In 1865 an American whaler met Eskimos on Manico Point.^[2] What we know about the Sadlermiut is, however, almost exclusively due to the collections and information brought home by the whaler Capt. George Comer, who was in touch with them repeatedly from 1898 to 1902. These collections, most of which are now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York (small portions in the National Museum of Canada, Ottawa, and in the Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin), have been comprehensively described by Professor Dr. Franz Boas^[3] in New York. Since then, information has appeared about the Sadlermiut in three small treatises on Southampton Island, two by Capt. Comer^[4] and the other by Capt. H. T. Munn.^[5]

Capt. Comer's collections partly comprise a number of specimens which originate from the Eskimos who died out in 1902 and who for the most part lived on the south coast of the island, and partly a collection from the northern part of the island, brought to him by Eskimos or excavated by himself; this latter has an earlier appearance. Capt. Comer's collections suffer from the defect that they were not systematically excavated and that all the details as to how they were found are very incomplete, for which reason the chronological circumstances are uncertain. We therefore considered a systematic excavation on Southampton Island to be an important link in the work of the Fifth Thule Expedition.

It was the arrangement that when my excavations at Naujan