Abstract
IT is announced that the Danish Government has awarded the gold medal and prize of 1,000 kronen, open to international competition for the best study of Eskimo origins, to Henry B. Collins, jun., of the U.S. National Museum, Washington, D.C. The problem of Eskimo origins is one in which the Danish people by historical association are peculiarly interested. Their anthropologists have on the whole adhered to the view put forward by Steensby of an eastern source. K. Birket-Smith, for example, in his book, originally published in 1927, but recently appearing in an English translation (see p. 722 of this issue), holds that the distinctive Eskimo culture developed somewhere in the neighbourhood of Hudson Bay; and that one line of migration, which travelled to the west, acquired elements of the earlier culture of Alaska and pushed on to Siberia. In America the cumulative effect of Asiatic affinities in indigenous cultures, as well as the evidence of physical anthropology, supporting an Asiatic source for American origins, has weighed against the acceptance of the eastern theory; while the archaeological evidence, which has accrued from the intensive investigations of recent years on ancient village sites in Alaska, has been interpreted in a like sense and as pointing to the extreme north-west, or even farther in Asia, as the area in which the beginnings of Eskimo culture must be sought. Mr. Collins, who himself has conducted excavations on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, in his thesis puts forward the view that Eskimo culture is derivative from the earlier Archaic or Bering Sea and Punuk cultures, its characteristic and fundamental elements, the house with entrance passage, skin boots, sledge, etc., going back ultimately to Siberia; while the eastern Eskimo, so far from being original, represent a degeneration in culture which came about in the course of their migration from the west eastward.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Eskimo Origins. Nature 137, 732 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137732b0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137732b0