Page:Archæology of the Central Eskimos.djvu/39
side the entrances to houses IV, V and VI. The portion excavated was by no means the whole refuse heap; it stretches still further out to all sides and also runs right up to the house walls; the houses have literally been buried in their own refuse. The excavated area is in the centre and the thickest part of the heap; it forms a rectangle 10 × 6 metres, running E. to W. The thickness was 1 metre except farthest to the SE., where the bottom was reached after excavating a 90 cm cultural deposit. The terrain on which the re- fuse heap lies slopes towards the south — in all half a metre on the excavated area. The bottom under the cultural deposit is turf, but farthest towards the south gravel, darkly discoloured by organic matter.
The refuse heap is formed of refuse of various kinds: broken pieces and unfinished implements and utensils, animal bones, baleen, pieces of wood, stone rubbish, feathers, canine excrement, hair, egg shells, pieces of skin, heather (Cassiope) etc. There is a considerable difference in the contents and nature of the various strata in the heap. At the top there are comparatively many stone objects; bones and bone objects are very decayed and interlaced by roots of vegetation; no wood or baleen. In the next strata bones and bone objects predominate. The lower half of the heap was quite typified by baleen, gigantic baleens, thrown away so that often the strata were densely packed with them; very often they made excavation very difficult, when one end was frozen fast and the other end was free, or when they projected from the walls of the excavation holes. Besides baleen and bone objects, these strata were rich in pieces of wood, feathers, flakes of walrus hide, bunches of hair, canine excrement, egg shells, ashes, slag, heather, all saturated with blubber; it will be understood that on a quiet summer day when the mosquitoes swarmed and the effluvia of the refuse heap was thick, it was anything but pleasant to be at the bottom of an excavating hole.
The explanation of the different nature of the upper and lower strata of the refuse heap is plain: the upper strata thaw every year and into these the roots of vegetation can penetrate; the baleen, wood and organic refuse could not be preserved and are partly decayed and partly rotted; the bones preserved much better and thus they are particularly dense here, but are often very decayed. In the lower, permanently frozen strata of the heap all the other refuse could be preserved and therefore the bones are less predominant, but on the other hand better preserved.
As an example of what the strata in the refuse heap could contain the following description of the contents of the various strata of Excavation Section Ab is given; Ab is in the centre of the excavated area of the heap and is one of its richest sections.