Page:Archæology of the Central Eskimos.djvu/437

with large combs. Sometimes willow twigs were plaited to form the platform covering; baleen plaiting was more rarely used, although Angutimarik has seen them used.

Snow houses were used, but only on journeys, never as dwellings for a long period. They were built on the same principle as those of the Aiviliks, but small and poor, with no doorway and often without any raised platform; the Sadlermiut were not clever at building snow houses. When building snow houses, the snow knife of whalebone or ivory, in one or two pieces, was used, snow shovels of whale scapula or antler and sealskin, and snow probes; the latter, of bone with a cross piece for a handle, were by no means always used; the Sadlermiut often simply stamped on the snow drift to test its firmness.

The tents were of hairy seal skins with the hair on the outside; the skeleton consisted of two four-sided, upright frames, connected by two horizontal cross pieces, all of whalebone; thus the tent was flat on the top. Sometimes double tents were used, with the entrance from the side; the rooms were divided by a passage, separated from the tent rooms by skin curtains. In the tents the platforms were not raised above the floor but only partitioned off by a row of stones and covered with caribou skins.

When hunting the caribou in the autumn, fall houses — qarmat — were sometimes built, low, round stone walls with a roof of skin; sometimes they were only built very roughly and simply used as a sleeping place for one night.

Of household utensils they had in the houses lamps, sometimes naturally hollowed lime-stones, at other times cemented together of lime-stone slabs; they had their position in the usual place, at the end of the platform, and were used both for illumination and for cooking in the winter, but only for illumination in summer, when food was cooked with the aid of bones and blubber in a small alcove in the doorway or on a small fireplace in or outside the tent. The women did not know how to attend to the lamps properly; they did not chop up the moss for wicks, but laid a row of large bunches of moss or fungus fibre along the edge of the lamp; as a result the lamps always smoked and everything in the house was covered with soot and blubber; an unworked bone, often a seal penis bone, was used as a lamp trimmer. A blubber dripper similar to that used by the Igluliks was often used. The blubber was filled into seal skins and placed under stones, where during the course of the summer it ran together, the same method as the Iglulik Eskimos use; the usual hammer-shaped type of blubber pounder, of antler, was used, although sometimes it was a walrus rib. Blubber seems to have always been present in abundance; in the