In 1917-1919, in the course of the John Wanamaker Expedition for the University Museum, Philadelphia, W. B. Van Valin, with the help of Charles Brower, the well-known local trader and collector, excavated near Barrow a group of six tumuli, which proved in the opinion of Van Valin to be so many old igloos, containing plentiful cultural as well as skeletal material. The collections eventually reached the museum, but due to lack of facilities they were in the main never unpacked.

I heard of this material first from Mr. Brower, with whom I sailed in 1926 from Barrow southward, and later with Dr. J. Alden Mason I saw the collection still in the original boxes, at the University Museum. In April of this year the skeletal remains were transferred to the Wistar Institute, Philadelphia, and after their transfer I obtained the permission of Dr. Milton J. Greenman, director of the Wistar Institute, to examine the material, which was of importance to him in connection with his own collections from Barrow and southward. A due acknowledgment for the privilege is hereby rendered to both Doctor Greenman and Doctor Mason.

The study proved one of unexpected and uncommon interest. The material was found to consist of two separate lots. The first of these consisted of a considerable number of brown colored, more or less complete skeletons with skulls, proceeding from the "igloos"; while the second lot comprised a series of whitened isolated skulls, without other skeletal parts and mostly even without the component lower jaws, gathered on the tundra near Barrow. At first sight, also, the skulls of the two groups were seen to present important differences.

The "igloo" crania, while plainly pure Eskimo, proved to be of a decidedly exceptional nature for this location. The skulls, in brief, were not of the general western Eskimo type, but reminded at once strongly of the skulls from Greenland and Labrador. And they were exceptionally uniform, showing that they belonged to a definite and distinct Eskimo group.

After writing of this to Doctor Mason, he kindly sent me a copy of the notes and observations on the discovery of the material by W. B. Van Valin, who was in charge of the excavation. The detailed notes will soon be published by Doctor Mason. The main information they convey is as follows:

The excavations by Van Valin date from 1918-19. They were made in six large "heaps," approximately 8 miles southwest of Barrow and about 1,000 yards back from the beach on the tundra. Two of the heaps were on the northern and four on the southern side of a ravine or draw formed by a drain flowing from inland to the sea. The Eskimo at Barrow knew nothing about these remains or their people.

Each of the heaps inclosed what in the excavator's opinion was an "igloo" made of driftwood and earth; and all contained evidently undisturbed human skeletons. The total number of bodies of all ages was counted as 83, and they ranged from infants to old people. There were many bird and other skins (for covers and clothing), and numerous utensils. The hair on the bodies was in general "black as a raven." Most of the bodies lay on "beds" of moss or "ground willows," or rough-hewn boards. There was no indication of any violence or sudden death. The bodies at places were in three levels, one above the other; but there was but moderate uniformity in the orientation of the bodies. There were found with the burials no traces of dogs (though there were some sled runners), and no metal, glass, pipes, labrets, nets, soapstone lamps or dog harness; but there were bows and arrows, bolas, and ordinary pottery. The cultural objects, Doctor Mason wrote me, resemble in a smaller measure those of the older Bering Sea, to a larger extent those of the old northern or "Thule" culture. There were some jadeite axes, indicating a direct or indirect contact with Kotzebue Sound and the Kobuk River.

Some of the bearskin coverings were "as bright and silvery" as the day the bear was killed (Van Valin); and the frozen bodies were evidently in a state of preservation approaching that of natural mummies.

Notwithstanding indications to the contrary, Van Valin reached the opinion that these remains were not those of regular burials, though offering no other definite hypothesis.

Desiring additional information about this highly interesting find, I wrote to Mr. Brower, who assisted at the excavations, and received the following answer:

The material.—The collection as received at the Wistar Institute was notable for its general dark color, enhanced in many of the specimens by dark to black remains of the tissues. There was no mineralization and but little bone decay, though the bones were somewhat brittle.

There is a scarcity of children and adolescents; there are in fact only two skulls of subjects less than 20 years of age in the collection.

The skulls and bones that remain show no violence.

The remains show a complete freedom from syphilis or other constitutional disease; the only pathological condition present in some of the bones being arthritis. This speaks strongly for their preceding the contact with whites. The surface series, though smaller, shows three syphilitic skulls. An additional fact of interest is the absence in both the igloo and the surface series of all marks of scurvy. Such marks are fairly common farther southward. Finally, none of the skulls are deformed, either in life or posthumously.

Anthropological Observations and Measurements on the Collections

Age.—The first observations made on the igloo material were those as to the individual ages of the bodies. Such observations are necessarily rough, yet within sufficiently broad limits fairly reliable. The criteria are principally the condition of the teeth and that of the sutures. The possible error in such estimates is, experience has shown, as a rule well within 10 years in the older and within 5 years in the young adults or subadults.

One of the objects of these observations on the "igloo" material was to get some further light on whether the remains were those of a group that perished of an epidemic, famine, or some other sudden agency, or whether they represented just burials. The age distribution of the dead would differ considerably in the two cases.

The above table shows the data obtained, with those on the surface material from the same collection and known to be that of ordinary burials.

The results do not agree with the composition of the living population but are apparently near to what might be expected in burials. Taking the sexes apart, the series from the surface shows a somewhat more favorable condition for the men, but worse for the women. Taking the materials, however, regardless of sex, the proportions of ages in the earlier igloos and in the late surface burials are practically identical. This points strongly against the idea of the igloo remains being those of people who either died there of starvation, of an epidemic, of being smothered, or of some other sudden affliction, and to their having been just ordinary burials.

To arrive at something still more definite, if possible, I appealed on the one hand to the United States Census and on the other to Doctor Dublin of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., New York, for data as to the distribution of ages among the dead, using the same age-categories as in the case of the "igloo" material. The data furnished by Miss E. Foudray through Dr. Wm. H. Davis, Chief Statistician of the Bureau of the Census, are particularly to the point. They are as follows:

There is a remarkable agreement of these figures with those obtained on both the Igloo and the Barrow surface burial material, except that for the two middle age series the figures are reversed. This may mean an error in the two respective estimates on the Indians, or it may mean that for these two ages the conditions among the Eskimo concerned were better than they were in 1900 among the Alaska Indians.

All the above, together with the details on the orderly treatment of the bodies, and the absence of such conditions as were encountered in the dead villages on St. Lawrence Island (Hooper, Nelson), inclines one to the conclusion that the Igloo remains, however exceptional the method for the Eskimo, were just burials.

Physical Characteristics

The skull.—The most noteworthy feature about the Igloo remains is the marked distinctiveness of the skull. This strikes the observer at the first sight of the specimens, and the impression is only strengthened by detail examination. The skulls are very narrow, long, and high. They differ plainly from anything except occasional individual specimens, either about Barrow or along the rest of the west coast of Alaska, with the possible exception of a few groups of Seward Peninsula. They recall strongly the crania of Labrador and south Greenland. It is the Labrador-Greenland type throughout, men, women, and even the two children. It is a group outside of the range of local variation. It is a strange Eskimo group, either developed here in former times as it developed in Greenland and Labrador, and possibly the Seward Peninsula, or one that had come here from places where such type had already been realized.

The following data (the individual measurements will appear in a later number of the Catalogue of Crania) show the differences between the Igloo and the surface material, the latter both of the Van Valin and of the author's collections, and the valuable StefÁnsson material, now at the American Museum, from Point Barrow. They need but little comment. They show clearly on one hand the wholly Eskimo nature of the Igloo skulls, and on the other their distinctness from those of the later burials, both of Barrow and Point Barrow. The vault especially is characteristic—narrow, long, high, more or less keel-shaped. The face in general is much more alike in the three groups; nevertheless its absolute height and breadth in the Igloo series are slightly smaller than in the other two, and there are minor differences in the orbits and the palate.

Let us now contrast the Igloo skulls with those of southern Greenland from the collection of the United States National Museum.[200] The size of the series is such that they are nicely comparable. And to the two is added a small recent series (A. H., 1926, and Collins, 1928), from Golovnin Bay and Sledge Island (Seward Peninsula).

A comparison of the Igloo and Greenland series shows striking similarities; hardly any two geographically separate groups originating from a single source could reasonably be expected to come nearer. The Igloo skulls are even narrower in the vault than the Greenlanders, which means so much farther away from the southwestern, midwestern, and Asiatic Eskimo; and offer a few other differences, but all these are of small moment, not affecting the essential relations of the two groups.

A comparison of the Igloo and Greenland series with the material from Golovnin Bay and Sledge Island shows also numerous similarities but with them some rather material differences. The differences are especially marked in the females, whose characteristics approach more those of the midwestern Eskimo, which suggests that an important proportion of them may have been derived from the latter. However, even the males tend to differ. Both sexes show absolutely a somewhat broader skull than that of the northerners; in both sexes the skull, as seen from the cranial module, is slightly larger in the Seward Peninsula series than in either of the other groups; but the principal differences are seen in the face, which in the Seward Peninsula group is perceptibly larger and especially higher than it is in either the Igloo or the Greenland series. The orbits also in the southerners are larger and the nose is slightly higher.

On the whole it may be said that the resemblance of the Igloo crania to those of Greenland is closer than that to either or both of the series of Golovnin Bay and Sledge Island. This suggests the possibility that a similar though not quite the same differentiation in the skull may have taken place both in the Seward Peninsula and in the far north; though the possibility of a derivation of any one of the three groups from any of the others can not be discarded. So far as the skull is concerned a definite solution of the identity of the Igloo material would have to be, it would seem, postponed to the future.

The used data on the Greenland Eskimo skulls agree closely with those of FÜrst and Hansen (Crania Groenlandica, fol., 1915), and also with the much fewer and scattered records of Virchow, Davis, Duckworth, Oetteking, Pittard, etc.,[201] on Eskimo skulls from Labrador.

Stature and strength.—The bones of the skeleton of the Igloo series show the people to have been of good height and of above medium Eskimo robustness. The principal measurements are given below, together with the corresponding ones on the western and the Yukon Eskimo. The material is not all that could be wished for, either in numbers or representation, but it will suffice for rough comparisons. Regrettably nothing for comparison is available as yet from Greenland or other parts of the far northeast where we meet with long, narrow, and high skulls.

The above table shows some remarkable and interesting conditions.

The first of the most apparent facts is that the type of the Yukon Eskimo stands well apart from both of the other series in a number of essentials, showing that it is not very nearly related and that it may be left out of consideration.

On the other hand the long bones from the Seward Peninsula and the northwest coast, especially those of the males, show very closely to those of the Igloo group. The male bones of the two series are almost identical, except that the Igloo bones are somewhat stronger.

Such close resemblances can hardly be fortuitous. They speak strongly for the basic identity of the old Igloo people with those of at least parts of the Seward Peninsula and parts of the northwest coast. If we take the bones from the Seward Peninsula alone (see p. 314) it is found that these resemblances still hold.

The evidence thus shown constitutes a strong indication that the old Igloo group may be inherently related to that part of the Eskimo population of Seward Peninsula which shows the long and narrow skull; but the data offer no light on the questions as to whether the Igloo group may have been derived from that of the Seward Peninsula or vice versa, and on the true relation of either or both of these to the Eskimo of Baffin Land, Greenland, and Labrador.

To definitely decide the problem of the Igloo group there are needed data on the long bones of the northeasterners; in the second place it is highly desirable to know how large and how ancient was the group of the narrow-headed people on the Seward Peninsula and Sledge Island; and in the third place it is important that the cultural history of the two groups be known as thoroughly as possible. All of which are tasks for the future.

The possibility of a development of the Igloo cranial type on the northwest coast itself can not be denied, in view of the facts that all its characteristics are within the ranges of normal individual variations on that coast, and that similar developments have evidently been realized elsewhere. But in such a case it would be logical to expect, locally or not far away, some ancestry of the group, and the group would not probably be limited to a little spot and a few scores of persons. Had the group developed incidentally from a physically exceptional family, it could not be expected to have been anywhere nearly as uniform as the group under consideration. The high degree of uniformity of the Igloo contingent speaks for a well accomplished differentiation; and as there is no other trace of this in the conditions near Barrow, and there are no ruins denoting a long occupation, the evidence is against a local development and for an immigration of the group. A coming of a small-sized contingent from the Seward Peninsula would be easy; its coming from Greenland or Labrador or Baffin Land would surely be difficult, but not impossible to the Eskimo, who is known to have been a traveler.

Whatever may be the eventual solution of the Igloo problem, it is plain that the presence of that group near Barrow, together with the presence of evidently closely related groups in a part of the Seward Peninsula and again in the far east of the Eskimo region, offers much food for thought and investigation. The most plausible possibility would seem to be a relatively late (within the present millennium) coming of a physically already well differentiated small group, from either the south or the east, with a relatively short settlement at the Barrow site, some local multiplication in numbers, and then extinction partly through disease, partly perhaps through absorption into a stronger and newer contingent derived from the western people.