Page:Archæology of the Central Eskimos.djvu/455

By means of purchase the Fifth Thule Expedition acquired some small archaeological collections from the district of Port Harrison on the west coast of Labrador and from the Belcher Islands. Even though these collections are only small and excavated without plan, they will be referred to here partly because they contain a few interesting specimens related to the Thule culture and partly because otherwise we know nothing at all about the archaeology of these regions.

While at Ponds Inlet in the summer of 1923 I obtained from Lieutenant G. Hérodier, who was the manager of Hudson's Bay Company's trading station there, a small collection of specimens which he had gathered himself while manager of the Révillon Frères station at Port Harrison, which lies a little south of Cape Duffrin on the west coast of Labrador. According to Hérodier's description, the specimens were collected at an old tenting place between the mouths of two rivers, an important hunting place for white whales, about five km north of the trading station; they were found by removing the 12 to 18 inch layer of moss from the tent rings,^[1] which are described as round, built of closely placed stones and lying up to 30 metres from the beach.

The collection comprises 69 specimens, 37 of which are of stone, the remainder of bone. The stone objects give a fairly homogeneous impression and are, with a few exceptions, of a blue-grey, rather fine grain slate. Of these slate specimens most of them — 28 out of 35 — are unground, whereby they differ from most other Eskimo slate objects; it might therefore be permissable to presume that all these unground slate objects are unfinished works; this is undoubtedly true of some of them, but by no means all; a number of them are so well and carefully made that they must be looked upon as quite ready for use.