Page:Archæology of the Central Eskimos.djvu/481
mitive — rows of bored holes. In the Naujan find we have rich ornamentation; in Qilalukan it seems to be on the decline; none of the harpoon heads from there are ornamented, whereas those from Naujan often are; in Comer's Midden the ornamentation has almost completely disappeared. This circumstance also attaches Comer's Midden nearest to Qilalukan and seems mostly to indicate that it is later than this find. Thus if Comer's Midden undoubtedly belongs to the Thule culture, we must look upon it as being one of the youngest links in the series of its finds.
This absence of decorative art may perhaps give a hint as to the chronological position of Comer's Midden in Greenland. Both in West and East Greenland there have, as we shall see later, been found fine examples of the decorative art which we know from Naujan, specimens which we should thus regard as being typologically older than Comer's Midden. The absence of Thule harpoon type 2 in Comer's Midden is also strange; this, which is the commonest type both at Naujan and at Qilalukan, is also known — as will be shown later — from other older finds both in the Cape York district itself and in West Greenland. Furthermore, Wissler figures (fig. 8) from Rensselaer Harbour in the Cape York district a knife with side blade of flint, apparently the prototype of the knives with iron edges in Comer's Midden, as well as (fig. 10) several flint objects from Etah, whereas these do not appear at all in Comer's Midden, where the meteoric iron technique has predominated. All this might indicate that it would not be quite impossible to find an earlier stage of the Thule culture represented in the Cape York district than that we have in Comer's Midden.
The find from Comer's Midden is one of the few unshakable holds we have as yet in the archaeology of Greenland and it shows with unfailing certainty that the old Central Eskimo Thule culture in its typical form has reached Northwest Greenland and has taken root there. In Comer's Midden at Thule appeared for the first time the peculiar whaling and baleen culture which we have now followed over great parts of Arctic America and which it is thus fully justifiable to call the Thule culture.