• Main Author: Margaret Lantis
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; eskimo*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.583.2637; http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/arctic7-3%264-307.pdf

A LTHOUGH nearly everyone who has written about Eskimo culture has admired its specialized adaptation to the arctic environment, almost no one in recent years has studied in detail any ecological problem connected with the Eskimo, except in physiology and health. Since these two fields are outside the scope of this article, a survey of ecological research on Eskimo and white man's culture in the American Arctic could be made very quickly, but it is necessary to take account of all the bits of ecological information scattered through the literature before recommendations can be made for future work. Most of the relevant literature in anthropology, human geography, sociology, demography, archaeology, and biology, published since 1940, has been considered to ascertain the trend of recent research and the most serious gaps in our knowledge. First, it is necessary to decide what adaptations have been made. Ideally, what a people started with in a given environment and the changes in that environment in the early stages of human occupation should be ascertained. The ecology of prehistoric man should be an important section of both