Note 69 — PART I

In Contributions to North American Ethnology, 1877, i. p. 43, Dall states that the débris of the heaps show tolerably uniform division into three stages, characterised by the food which formed the staple of subsistence and by the weapons for obtaining as well as the utensils for preparing the food. The stages are: 1st, The Littoral period, represented by the Echinus layer; 2nd, The Fishing period, represented by the Fish-bone layer; 3rd, The Hunting period, represented by the Mammalian layer. This antecedence of fishing before hunting, if Dall be correct, was, I imagine, caused probably by local or climatic conditions in the Arctic Circle; it is not the general rule elsewhere.