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FEATURE 110 The Fifth Thule Expedition of Knud Rasmussen By Leif Birger Holmstedt Between 1902 and 1933, Danish Polar explorer Knud Rasmussen (fig. 1) staged seven expeditions intended to study and document the Arctic cultures of Greenland and North America. The objects and information that were gathered during the course of these rigorous journeys greatly contributed to our understanding of the life and history of the northern peoples most commonly known as the Eskimo, a blanket exogenous term that incorporates any number of contemporary and ancient Arctic cultures including the Inuit and Yupik, to name just two major subgroups. Rasmussen’s expeditions included archaeologists, botanists, anthropologists, and cartographers who gathered valuable specimens and documentation, as well as painters and photographers, who created striking visual images of Eskimo life and activity set against the magnificent backdrop of the Arctic landscape (for a general article about Rasmussen, see Holmstedt, 2006, in Tribal Art magazine). The most important, ambitious, and comprehensive of Rasmussen’s expeditions was the Fifth Thule Expedition (1921–1924), also referred to as The Danish Ethnographical Expedition to Arctic North America. It went from Greenland across the Davis Strait to Arctic Canada, and along the northern Arctic coast to Alaska, ending with a visit to the East Cape Eskimos on the western side of the Bering Strait—a distance of more than 18,000 km (fig. 2). Among this expedition’s many valuable contributions, it demonstrated that the various Eskimo groups used essentially the same language all along the Arctic Ocean, from Greenland in the east to the Bering Strait in the west, also sharing common traits with the Uralic- Siberian language spoken across the strait in northeast- From Greenland across Arctic Canada to Alaska


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