Owing to being almost entirely surrounded by snow, these winter houses were very warm.

Their household furniture consisted of stone kettles and wooden troughs of various sizes, also dishes, scoops, and spoons made of musk-ox horns.

The stone kettles (which some people think they borrowed from the Norse discoverers of America in the eleventh century) were as large as to be capable of containing five or six gallons.

They were, of course, carved out of solid blocks of stone, every one of them being ornamented with neat moulding round the rims, and some of the large ones with fluted work at each corner.

In shape they were oblong, wider at the top than the bottom, and strong handles of solid stone were left at each end to lift them up.
The Eskimo hatchets were made of a thick lump of copper about five or six inches long, and one and a half to two inches broad.