[139] Oldest girls of an orphanage.
[140] From the base line of the 2 meatus; this and all other measurements, including those of 1912, were taken by Hrdlička's methods and with his instruments. (See his "Anthropometry," Wistar Institute, Philadelphia, 1920.)
[141] Subadult in chest.
Present Data on the Skull and other Skeletal Remains of the Western Eskimo
THE SKULL
Until recently collections of skeletal remains of the western Eskimo were confined largely to skulls. The material in our own institutions comprised a small collection of Mahlemut (St. Michael Island) and "Chukchee" (Asiatic Eskimo) crania made in the early sixties by W. H. Dall; a larger series of crania gathered in 1881 on St. Michael and St. Lawrence Islands by E. W. Nelson; 28 skulls with 3 skeletons brought in 1898 by E. A. McIlheny from Point Barrow; a valuable lot of skulls from Indian Point, Siberia, with a few from St. Lawrence Island, collected by W. Bogoras; and some scattered specimens by other explorers. To this were added in 1912 an important collection of skulls, with a few skeletons, made by Riley D. Moore, at that time my aide, on St. Lawrence Island; an important lot of crania gathered a few years later by V. Stefánsson at Point Barrow; and a third large and highly interesting lot, this time of both skulls and skeletons, collected near Barrow for the University Museum at Philadelphia in 1917-1919 by W. B. Van Valin. But none of the later material was described excepting the McIlheny collection which, in 1916, was reported upon by E. W. Hawkes.[142]
During the survey which is the subject of this report a special effort was made to collect all the older skeletal material along the Bering Sea and Arctic coasts that could be reached, and the result was the bringing back of some 450 crania, nearly 50 with skeletons, and many separate parts of the skeleton; nearly all of the specimens proceeding from localities thus far not represented in the collections. To which were added in 1927 nearly 200 skulls with a good number of skeletons gathered by H. B. Collins, jr., assistant curator in the Department of Anthropology, United States National Museum, and my aide, T. D. Stewart, on Nunivak Island and along the west coast of Alaska from Bristol Bay to near the Yukon delta.[143]
We thus have now a relatively vast amount of skeletal material on the western Eskimo; it is essentially a virginal material; it is well identified as to locality; and the specimens are mostly in very good condition.
Aside from Hawkes's thesis, nothing of note had been published on these collections until 1924, when the first number of my Catalogue of Human Crania in the United States National Museum Collections appeared, which includes the principal measurements on 290 skulls of the western Eskimo. Since then, in view of the growing importance of the subject, I have remeasured every specimen reported before; have measured personally all the new collections; and thanks to the kindness of those in charge have been enabled to extend the measurements to all the collections of Eskimo crania, both from Alaska and elsewhere, that were preserved up to the spring of 1928 at the National Museum at Ottawa, the American Museum of Natural History of New York, and the Wistar Institute of Philadelphia, which now contains the University Museum collections. The total records reach now to 1,283 adult skulls from practically all important parts of the total Eskimo area, besides a considerable quantity of other bones of the skeleton. The main results of the work will be given here, the detailed measurements being reserved for another number of the Catalogue.