Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/45

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
32

of old ruins of whale bone houses,[1] of which some seem to have been transformed into autumn houses in comparatively recent years but have again been allowed to become dilapidated. Beyond these ruins, right out by the coast, the modern snow-house village Iglulik Fig. 4.Sketch of the snow village Iglulik April 1st 1922. Scale 1:1000. rises every year. In the shelter of the lowest shore ridge a large, deep snow-drift forms and provides material for the houses. and two reefs, their surfaces just lying on the top of the water. stretch outwards like a pair of arms and form between them a plain of flat ice in front of the settlement, to which admission is gained through an opening between the "arms".

Fig. 4 is a sketch of the snow-house village of Iglulik as it appeared when I was there for the first time at the end of March 1922, and Fig. 5 is a photograph of it.

When Parry reached Iglulik Island on July 16th, 1822, he found 17 tents and about 120 people living on the east side of Turton Bay;[2] when he returned to Iglulik in September. 1822, he found some of the Eskimos living in bone houses with skin roofs. whereas others lived in ice houses[3] later on during the winter most of them gathered out on the sea ice, where they lived in snow houses, and by the middle of February they had all moved out there.[4] Parry[5] refers to Iglulik as "one of their principal rendezvous, forming, as it were, a sort of central link in the very extensive chain of these peoples peregrinations", and Lyon[6] judges from the quantity of refuse that "the island of Igloolik must have been, for centuries, the residence of the Esquimaux".

  1. ↑ More fully described in Archaeology of the Central Eskimos I p. 120.
  2. ↑ Lyon 1824 p. 230.
  3. ↑ Parry 1824 p. 358.
  4. ↑ l. c. p. 386, 389 and 400.
  5. ↑ l. c. p. 451.
  6. ↑ 1824 p. 236.
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.