Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/148

connected by a seal thong which passed from a stone 3.5 m in front of the tent. The tent sheet was of hairy caribou skin with the hair on the outside; only the door consisted of unhaired skin scraped thin; there were 24 stones. This caribou skin tent is warmer, but not so durable as seal-skin tents and is not used to any great extent.

Parry^[1] refers to a tent at Lyon Inlet thus: "It consisted of a rude circular wall of loose stones, from six to eight feet in diameter and three in height, in the centre of which stood an upright pole made of several pieces of firwood lashed together by thongs and serving as a support to the deer-skins that formed the top covering." Tent rings of the kind here described, consisting of closely placed, big stones or walls of smaller stones, are. as mentioned in my archaeolegical work,^[2] extremely common in Repulse Bay and on the southern half of Melville Peninsula; such walls are never used now; like the corresponding, heavy oval tent rings, they seem to be connected with the Thule culture; but from Parry's description we see that they have been in use right up to his time. The modern tent rings form a circular or slightly oval ring of stones at intervals; inside are the platform stones and, very often, three stones placed together where the fire-place has been. In the Iglulik area, where large stones are not plentiful, lime grits were often used to weight the tent sheet. and thus the tent ring here often appears merely as a low mound of grits.

On Button Point I saw quite a small tent. used by a mentally deficient girl; it was built of three small poles which met at the middle, over which the tent sheet was drawn; the height was only a good metre and the owner could just sit upright in it.

When cooking in the open air a small kitchen tent (talo) is often built — a skin laid over two poles to provide shelter from the wind; here the cooking is done by means of blubber and bones or with heather, bilberry or willow twigs; bear bones are said to be particularly good to cook with.

When a tent is to be pitched the procedure is as follows: Large stones are laid in a ring; the tent skin is spread out and drawn into position; stones are laid on the rear part of the tent, the two fore cross-poles are put in and the line from them to the big stone is connected, after which the cross is raised; the centre-pole is erected and finally the tent sheet is stretched on all sides and the stones laid on. In windy weather especially it is necessary that these are near at hand (Southampton Island, October 1922).