“Stone-craft.—This embraces all the operations, tools, and apparatus employed in gathering and quarrying minerals and working them into paints, tools, implements, and utensils, or into ornaments and sculptures, from the rudest to such as exhibit the best expressions in fine art. Another branch is the gathering of stone for building.
“Water industry.—This includes activities and inventions concerned in finding, carrying, storing, and heating water, and in irrigation; also, far more important than any of these, the making of vessels for plying on the water, which was the mother of many arts. The absence of the larger beasts of burden and the accommodating waterways together stimulated the perfecting of various boats to suit particular regions.
“Earth-work.—To this belong gathering, carrying, and using the soil for construction purposes, excavating cellars, building sod- and snow-houses, and digging ditches. The Arctic permanent houses were made of earth and sod, the temporary ones of snow cut in blocks, which were laid in spiral courses to form low domes. The Eskimo were especially ingenious in solving the mechanical problems presented by their environment of ice....
Fig. 14. Free-hand, or direct percussion. First step in shaping an implement from a boulder. Figs. 23, 28, and 29 to 33 are from the American Anthropologist, vol. IV, 1891—W. H. Holmes’s paper.
“Ceramic art.—This industry includes all operations in plastic materials. The Arctic tribes in the extreme North, which lack proper stone, kneaded with their fingers lumps of clay mixed with blood and hair into rude lamps and cooking-vessels, but in the zone of intense cold, besides the ruder forms there was no pottery....
“Metal-craft.—This includes mining, grinding of ores and paint, rubbing, cold-hammering, engraving, embossing, and overlaying with plates. The metals were copper, hematite and meteoric iron, lead in the form of galena, and nugget gold and mica. No smelting was done.
Fig. 15. Flaking-tool—being a shaft or stick, thirty inches to four feet. These were pointed with bone or buck-horn.
