A man cannot live without cozy home, protecting him from all the troubles of the outside world. And wherever he is, the first thing a person does is build a house. What a home should be like depends on the natural materials that a person can find around him. In the mountains, houses are made of stone and clay, on the plains they are made of wood, there are houses made of brick, of branches, but what can be used to make a shelter from the cruel winds in the midst of the kingdom of cold, snow and ice?
Yes, and in such harsh conditions people live too. There is one northern people- Eskimos, who came up with a wonderful house that can be built from material that is available in huge quantities in the endless snowy expanses.
Igloo - round house, which is built from ground large pieces of dense snow. In it, northern housewives managed to achieve the maximum possible comfort and coziness. Fur skins were laid out and a fire was lit. It became warm and light. The walls cannot melt from the fire, since the severe frost outside does not give them such an opportunity.
Large slabs of snow were prepared for the construction of walls. Then a circle was marked in the snow and the first layer was laid out on it. The next rows were laid with a slight slope into the house, forming an oval dome. Gaps were left between the snow slabs. They were not joined closely. The cracks were then covered with snow and sealed with a special lamp containing seal oil. The heat from the burning lamp melted the inner surface of the walls, the cold froze the water, forming an ice crust.
The door to such a dwelling was made (sawed) very low, or a tunnel was even dug in the snow. The entrance hole was in the floor and you had to crawl to get home.
The houses were made very small - at the maximum point of the dome it barely fit standing man. This made it easier to heat the house and retain valuable heat. A hole was cut in the dome to allow the air necessary for breathing to flow in. The family usually lay down opposite him to sleep on beds made of snow blocks covered with skins.
Thus, the Eskimos built entire villages from snow. It is interesting that even in the short, cool summer the dense snow that makes up the walls does not have time to melt.
Now, of course, the igloo is becoming more of a romance than a necessity. Many modern people they are happy to travel north to try to spend the night in a snow house built with their own hands..
Yarangi
From time immemorial, people have built houses to have protection from bad weather, wild animals and evil people. Wherever man has gone before! And everywhere he had to build houses. Trees were used in the forest, stones in the mountains.
Have you ever seen fur houses?
Northern residents live in such houses and they are called yarangas.
The peoples of the North devote all their time to hunting and breeding reindeer, which is why it is so important for them to have houses that allow them to quickly change their place of residence. When the food needed by the herd runs out or an animal leaves, a person packs up and moves to a new place.
Would you try to transport stone or wooden house!
This is how the yarangas arose - small houses from fur. They are specially designed so that they can be very easily and quickly assembled, transported and set up again.
Wooden poles are placed in a circle,
creating a conical dome shape. When this labor-intensive work is completed, the poles are covered with deer skins. The average yaranga usually takes about fifty deer skins. But they still need to be processed (made) first, and then sewn.
It is not simple. Imagine how much work a woman must put into creating family nest, because almost all the work of making outerwear for him lies on her shoulders.
She soaks the skin and scrapes off the flesh. Then the skin goes through a series of tanning procedures. Interestingly, deer skins are tanned using deer feces.
What a job! How modern city woman agree to this!
Apply the stool as evenly as possible, fold the skin and wait until it is saturated and dry.
Well, on the other hand, where can you find other tanning agents in the Far North? And maybe it is the best of all.
Then the women scrape everything off the skins and soften the furs, vigorously smoothing them with their feet.
Cooked skins were sewn together with interesting threads. The main breadwinners in the lives of people in the North were deer. Their meat was eaten, clothes were made from their skins, and even threads for sewing skins were made from deer tendons.
At the top, bare poles form a chimney for the fireplace directly below.
Inside the outer dome there is another square tent, called the canopy. There is a living space here, it retains heat even in the most severe frost. The canopy was heated with a special grease lamp.
The structure of the northern house turned out to be interesting, very economical - there was no need for a lot of fuel or special super-stoves, the ancestors of the northerners simply built residential thermoses or large sleeping bags.
This dwelling turned out to be so rational that even now reindeer herders use yarangas, despite the abundance of all kinds of modern dwellings. There are no substitutes yet for what the older generations of northerners came up with.
The Arctic Training Center, located in the village of Puvirnituk, a few kilometers from Nunavik (Northern Quebec), teaches survival skills and the art of igloo building. Teachers from the Inuit tribe teach disciplines necessary for life in this inhospitable region.
Paulusi Novalinga, 56, was born and raised in an igloo. For many years he hunted and fished with his father, as their ancestors had done, and traveled across the frozen desert on dog sleds. Times have changed now, but 12 years ago Novalinga helped found a “school of survival” in an attempt to save ancient skills from oblivion. The school accepts young village boys and trains people from the outside - military, polar pilots, tourists.
Ideal material for the construction of an igloo - deep, dense snow that fell during one good snowfall. Such a snow mass does not have layers that could later cause the destruction of the building. In addition, it is better to take snow from the windward side of the hill, since under the influence of the wind it is packed into a denser mass.
The peoples of the north showed miracles of ingenuity by inventing their own igloos. For this construction, material that is always at hand and the simplest tools are used.
When trying a crust with a “panak” (homemade machete), they choose the most appropriate place and cut out rectangular building blocks. One such brick weighs approximately 10 kg, and its texture resembles foamed polystyrene.
A circle three meters in diameter is drawn on the snow crust. The first block is laid upright directly on this line, cutting the left edge so that it coincides with an imaginary vertical plane passing through the center of the circle. Then they take the next block, trim its right edge so that it fits closely to the left edge of the previous block, and move the blocks together. You need to carefully monitor which side of the block should be facing up and which side should be facing inside the needle. The Inuit believe that improperly laid blocks can cause storms.
Chain arch vault
In cross-section, the igloo has the shape of a chain arched vault. If you hang a chain or very flexible cable, they take a specific shape that can be described by a function called hyperbolic cosine. This perfect shape for a vault that does not require additional columns or struts to support its own weight. Similar designs They work almost exclusively in compression - no stretching, bending or shearing, therefore they are very strong and reliable, especially with a material such as compressed snow. The chain arch vault was used by the famous Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi in his Casa Mila building in Barcelona. The giant 192-meter Gateway Arch in St. Louis has the same shape.
The weight of each row of bricks is carefully distributed across the row of blocks underneath and across the rows below, ensuring the stability of the entire structure. Arctic magazine from December 1973 shows calculations according to which the stability of an igloo is determined by the ratio of height and diameter. Its minimum value is 3:10. In other words, an igloo with a height of one to eighty meters and a width of three meters (ratio 3:5) will stand quite securely, but an igloo with a height of one and a half meters and a width of seven and a half (ratio 1:5) will almost certainly collapse.
After inserting the next block, you need to cut out the excess snow from the middle of the bottom edge. To do this, “panak” is inserted into bottom seam and they scratch there with a blade. Here it is - the secret trick to building an igloo! Each block should rest on the underlying row only with its lower ribs, working like a small arch. The blocks climb up in a spiral. With each turn they are placed with an increasing slope into the building. Upper blocks are laid almost horizontally. Their own binding bonds operate here, since snow at the microscopic level is constantly in the process of melting and freezing. But now the last block has been inserted, having irregular shape, and the igloo is ready. Novalinga won one of the competitions by building such a dwelling in 20 minutes.
For the Inuit, an igloo is a home and hearth, the center of their universe. But as an attribute Everyday life it is already erased from their memory. Someday Novalinga will stop teaching others the secrets of building igloos, and this art will fall out of the hands of the people for whom it has been the basis of life for many centuries.
I built this igloo with my own with my own hands by Popular Mechanics Jeff Wise.
How to build an igloo
Material
Dig a trench in the snow, well compacted by the winds. This will help you cut out your first snow blocks. Using a snow cutter or saw, cut out blocks measuring 30 x 60 x 45 cm.
Foundation
Select the center of the future igloo and draw a circle around it with a diameter of 2-3 m. Lay out the blocks along this contour, adjusting their edges so that they fit tightly together.
Construction
Cut off the top underneath inclined plane, which should start between two blocks and continue half the perimeter of the bottom row. Align the top planes of the blocks so that they coincide with an imaginary line from the top outer edge of the blocks to the center of the floor of the future igloo (1). Each freshly laid block should rest on the base only with its lower ribs (2).
Output Formation
Dig an entrance tunnel. It is better if it faces down the slope to better retain heat.
Push the last block sideways through the remaining hole, turn it horizontally and stick it in place (3). Wall up the remaining cracks with snow. Make holes for ventilation.
It's no secret that people, since ancient times, began to use materials that were nearby for their needs. Those who live in forested areas have long built their houses from wood, but if there is clay nearby, people create bricks from it and build brick houses. What then can the Eskimos do if they have nothing nearby but snow? Of course, build your homes from snow and ice.
Igloo, translated from Inuktitut (as most Inuit Canadian dialects call it), means “winter dwelling of the Eskimos.” The igloo is a dome-shaped building with a diameter of 3-4 meters and a height of approximately human height. They build it from what is at hand, and in the winter tundra the only building materials at hand are snow... An igloo is built from snow or ice blocks compacted by the wind. If the snow is deep, the entrance to the igloo is made in the floor, and a corridor is dug to the entrance. If the snow is not deep enough, you have to make an entrance in the wall, and an additional corridor of snow blocks is added to it.
Alone, an Eskimo builds a spacious snow hut for his entire family in three quarters of an hour. The strongest snowstorm is inaudible in the hut. The snow bricks grow together tightly, and the hut freezes over as it heats up inside. They say that igloos can even withstand the weight of a polar bear.
How can you breathe under the snow? Fine. After all, if the entrance to the needle is located below floor level, then the outflow of heavy carbon dioxide from it and the influx of lighter oxygen in return are ensured. In addition, this arrangement of the inlet does not allow warm air to leave the home - it is known to be lighter than cold air. However, for ease of breathing, a ventilation hole is punched in the vault with a needle.
As a result of heating, the internal surfaces of the walls melt, but the walls do not melt. The colder it is outside, the higher the heat the igloo can withstand from the inside. After all, wet snow loses its heat-protective properties and allows the cold to pass through more easily. Having made its way through the thickness of the block, the frost freezes the inner surface of the walls, which has begun to melt, and the temperature pressure outside and inside is balanced.
In general, the thermal conductivity of a snow dome is low, and it is easy to maintain a positive temperature in a hut; often the heat generated by sleeping people is sufficient for this. In addition, the snow hut absorbs excess moisture from the inside, so the igloo is quite dry.
Today, igloo huts are used in ski tourism as emergency housing in case of problems with the tent or a long wait for better weather. However, polar travelers did not immediately learn how to build igloos. For a long time It was believed that only a native Eskimo could build an igloo.
Canadian Vilhjalmur Stefansson was the first to learn how to build an igloo in 1914. He wrote about this in his book and in articles, but even from them it turned out to be difficult to learn how to do it. The secret of building an igloo was the special shape of the slabs, which made it possible to build the hut in the form of a “snail”, gradually tapering towards the vault. The method of installing the slabs also turned out to be important - resting on the previous ones at three points.
The Eskimos skillfully transform their winter settlements into a complex complex of snow buildings and, in bad weather, can visit neighboring huts without going to the surface. Rasmussen, in his book “The Great Sleigh Road,” talks about snow villages with covered passages between igloos, entire architectural ensembles erected by the Eskimos with amazing speed, and large hut-houses.
“The main housing could easily accommodate twenty people for the night. This part of the snow house turned into a high portal like a “hall”, where people cleared the snow off themselves. Adjacent to the main dwelling was a spacious, bright annex where two families lived. We had plenty of fat, and therefore 7-8 lamps were burning at a time, which is why it became so warm in these walls of white snow blocks that people could walk around half naked to their fullest pleasure.”
Interior The igloo is usually covered with skins, and sometimes the walls are also covered with skins. Fat bowls are used for heating and additional lighting. The Eskimos cover the bed with a double layer of reindeer skins, and the bottom layer is laid with the flesh side up, and upper layer- flesh down. Sometimes old skin from a kayak is placed under the skins. This three-layer insulation serves as a comfortable soft bed.
Sometimes igloos have windows made of seal guts or ice, but even without that, the sun penetrates into the igloo directly through the snow walls with a soft light of different shades. At night, one candle lit in the hut brightly illuminates the snow-white vault, and at the joints of the bricks this light breaks through more thin layer snow.
Outside, in the freezing darkness of the night, the igloo glows with a web of blurry lines. This is truly an extraordinary sight. It’s not for nothing that Knud Rasmussen called the igloo “a temple of festive joy among the snowdrifts of the snowy desert.”
In the conditions of the far north, building a reliable shelter is the key to survival. At the same time, such options as huts and dugouts, which are capable of saving a traveler in the forest or in the tundra, turn out to be ineffective. On far north a lost traveler or hunter can take refuge in a snowy dwelling invented by the Eskimos - an igloo.
Eskimo snow house or snow igloo
Harsh natural conditions forced the inhabitants of the north to build shelters for themselves. Construction material Snow served as the basis for building a dwelling for the Eskimos. Possessing amazing properties, it protected a person from the wind and exposure to low temperatures. And if you have a candle with you and light it inside, you can easily warm yourself up in such a home. In addition, snow can transmit light and water vapor. What is surprising is that when a candle or lamp burns, the walls of such a dwelling melt, but do not melt. An Eskimo house may also consist of separate ice huts, connected by transitions.
There are basic rules that you need to know in order to do snow igloo:
- you can dig with a knife, saw, bowl and shovel;
- do not make the shelter large (the smaller, the warmer);
- the cracks are covered with snow;
- try not to sweat (remove excess clothing);
- When constructing an igloo from snow, it is necessary to use a bedding made of waterproof material.
If you try and find a huge snowdrift, you can build an entire Eskimo house in it. It looks like a cave. The entrance can be dug into the wall lower and a small corridor can be added to strengthen the structure. The diameter at the base can be 3 or 4 meters. The low construction of the entrance to the needle is due to the fact that warm air, rising to the top, does not evaporate. The heavier carbon dioxide sinks down and comes out. Lighting shines directly through the walls. You can make a window using ice instead of glass. Inside, make flooring from skins on the floor and on the walls too. Now real home Eskimos are ready. You can light a candle or fat lamp inside.
If the snow is dense, then it is possible to cut entire blocks out of it with a hacksaw. They are made from foam plastic and are suitable for constructing igloos from snow. Blocks are cut from the side of the snowdrift from where the wind was blowing. They are stronger there. The blocks are heavy, weighing about 10 kg. When building an igloo, you shouldn’t go far in search of a good crust, otherwise you might get tired, and this is dangerous in the cold. After all, there are no deer or dogs in sled nearby to transport the blocks. You need to find a snowdrift 1 m or higher in height. Next, start cutting bricks out of it. Do not move anywhere within a radius of 30 m, you need to save energy. Using a knife, you need to mark a contour in the snow, draw a circle with a diameter of 3 meters. A place to enter the snow igloo is immediately marked.
- Begin building the igloo during daylight hours.
- You cannot rebuild the shelter at night.
- It is forbidden to leave it at night or in poor visibility conditions.
- Do not place the entrance into the wind.
- Have a shovel or tool on hand to clear the entry hole.
- Do not build an igloo larger than 3 m in diameter (the stability of the structure is sharply reduced).
- Carefully draw the circle during construction.
- Dilute with extreme caution open fire inside (possible poisoning carbon monoxide).
- It is forbidden to sleep if there is a threat of freezing.
- Drinking alcohol is also not recommended.
Dangerous! If one of the group members has a heartache or chest pain, vomiting, dizziness, tinnitus, nausea or a dry cough with watery eyes, the victim must be immediately removed from the igloo to the air. Cases have been described fatalities. You should also turn off all heat-producing devices and ventilate the room. Remember that carbon monoxide poisoning most often occurs while people are sleeping.
How to make an igloo out of snow with your own hands
One block must be placed tightly against the other by tapping with a knife. In this case, snow plays the role of cement. First you need to sand the horizontal seam, and then the vertical seam. Seal the chips with snow and fill the cracks that form during the construction of the igloo with your own hands with snow crumbs. It is very difficult to cut an exit without damaging the structure. In order to make a snow igloo durable, it is important to carefully approach the details.
When the process of laying snow slabs begins, a hole will form at the top. To prevent the last top slab from sliding off from above, it is placed in the form of a wedge. Such a snow brick seems to jam the ceiling hole. It is made larger than the hole so that it does not slip through.
IN winter time, at negative temperature, a snow igloo can last from 3 to 5 months. Eskimo housing is capable of maintaining a more or less stable temperature inside. In such a room the temperature ranges from -6° to +2°. If you light a candle, you can heat the room to +16°. But the Eskimos heated the igloos with lamps containing deer or seal fat. The temperature in such a dwelling rose to +20°, despite the fact that there was a frost of -40° all around. It was hot to sit in clothes, and they undressed. A small corridor also emerged from the snow. To protect against attacks by polar bears, the igloo was covered with a large block of snow at night.
How to avoid freezing inside a snow house
After compacting the floor into the snow igloo, a layer of spruce branches or fragments of tree branches is placed on it. You need to put the skis on top, bindings down. A cellophane film, a piece of fabric or a blanket is laid out on them. The skis are laid out like a fan, wider at the head and narrower at the legs. All people should lie on one side and press tightly against each other. The weakest ones should be in the middle. In extreme cold, do not lie on your back. If there are empty ones in stock plastic bottles from water, then you can put them under yourself. It is necessary to slightly unscrew the plugs before lying down. They will bend a little under the weight and will save you from lying on the snowy floor.
It must be remembered that hypothermia of the thigh is no less dangerous than hypothermia of the chest. It is better to remove wet clothes so as not to increase the cooling. You need to take turns sleeping. During a snowstorm, do not come out of shelter. Each exit outside introduces cold air into the snowy house. A lit candle, 10 cm in size, can burn for 2 hours. It is necessary to insulate your head and legs as much as possible, and put on a hood. You cannot undress in a shelter unless your clothes are wet. If your partner is trembling, do not be afraid - this is defensive reaction body. But if a person does not react to frost, this is dangerous. You can stretch your limbs and warm up with physical exercise.
Eskimo camps consist of several dwellings housing three or four related families. Eskimo dwellings are divided into two types: winter and summer. One of the oldest types of winter housing, widespread in the past throughout the entire territory of Eskimo settlement, was a stone building with a floor sunk into the ground. Such a house, located on a slope, was approached from below by a long passage made of stones, partly buried in the ground; the last part of the passage is higher than the floor and blocked by a wide stone slab, at the same height as the bunks in the hut. The house had the same plan as a modern dwelling (see below): sleeping bunks in the back and bunks for lamps on the sides. The walls above the ground are made of stones and whale ribs, or of whale ribs alone, the arcs of which are placed along the walls so that their ends intersect. Where there is absolutely no flowing timber, the roof frame was made of whale ribs, supported by supports. This frame was covered with seal skins, tied tightly; a thick layer of small heather bushes was placed on the skins, and another layer of skins was strengthened on top.
In the central regions of the American Arctic, these stone dwellings were replaced by snow huts - igloos, which are still being built today.
In Labrador, in the northern regions of Alaska and Greenland, igloos were also known, but they served only as temporary dwellings during travel and hunting expeditions. Igloos are built from snow slabs. They are laid in a spiral, from right to left. To start a spiral, cut two slabs diagonally in the first row to the middle of the third and begin the second row; Each next row is tilted slightly more than the bottom one, “to get a spherical shape. When a small hole remains at the top, the builder lifts the block that was given to him in advance from the inside, cuts it wedge-shaped and closes the vault with it. Having walled himself in the hut, he seals the cracks with snow; from the outside through a snowdrift They dig a tunnel leading to the hut and ending with a hatch in its floor; if the underlying layer of snow is shallow, then they lay out a corridor of snow slabs and cut an entrance hole in the wall of the igloo.
The outer entrance to the snow tunnel is about 1.5 m high, so you can walk bent over or with your head bowed, but the entrance from the tunnel to the hut itself is usually so low that you have to crawl into it on all fours, and you can only stand up to your full height finding yourself inside. The hut is usually 3-4 m in diameter and 2 m in height, so that, standing in the middle, you can reach the ceiling with your hand. Large huts are built less often. Large snow house can be up to 9 m in diameter at the floor, with a height from the floor to the center of the arch of about 3-3.5 m; such large houses are used for meetings and celebrations.
To finish the hut, a lamp containing seal oil is lit inside. When the air heats up, the snow begins to melt, but does not drip, since the water formed from the melting is absorbed by the thickness of the snow. When inner layer the vault and walls are sufficiently moistened, cold air is allowed into the hut and allowed to freeze; as a result, the walls of the home are covered from the inside with a glassy ice film (polar explorers who borrowed snow construction equipment among the Eskimos, they call it glazing the hut) - this reduces thermal conductivity, increases the strength of the walls and makes life in the hut more comfortable. If there was no ice crust, then as soon as you touched the wall, the snow would fall off and stick to your clothes. Until the hut has been exposed to the cold, its strength is low. But thanks to warming up, a general precipitation of the snow occurs, the seams are soldered and the hut becomes strong, turning into a monolithic snow dome. Several people can climb on it, and it has happened that polar bears have climbed on it without causing harm to it.
During the day it is quite light in the snow hut, even in cloudy weather (you can read and write); on sunny days the lighting is so bright* that it can cause the disease so-called snow blindness. But during the polar twilight, the Eskimos sometimes insert windows made of thin lake ice into their snow huts; For windows, small holes are cut above the entrance. For lighting and heating the hut, lamps - bowls, or fat lamps - are used; their light, reflected from the countless ice crystals of the dome, becomes soft and diffused. Even if the hut doesn’t even have ice-cold windows, it can be seen half a kilometer away at night, thanks to the pink glow of the dome.
If the heat of the lamp begins to melt the vault, then they climb onto the dome from the outside and scrape off a 5-10 cm layer of snow on top with a knife to cool the hut and stop the melting. If, on the contrary, the hut cannot be heated, and frost forms on the inside of the vault, falling down in snow flakes, then the roof is thin, then snow is thrown onto the dome with shovels.
Most of the inside of the hut, opposite the entrance, is occupied by a snow bed. For it, they try to use either the surface of the snowdrift on which the hut stands, or a natural ledge of soil; if this is not the case, then they make it out of snow blocks. The bed is covered with a double layer of skins; The bottom layer is turned with the wool down, the top layer is turned with the wool up. Sometimes old skin from a kayak is placed under the skins. This three-layer insulating bedding keeps body heat out and prevents the snow bed from melting, while at the same time protecting the sleeper from the cold. Sometimes small recesses for things are cut out in the thickness of the couch on the side. These niches are plugged with small blocks of snow. They sleep, eat, work and relax on the bed.
To the right and left of the entrance, small snow bunks adjoin the large sleeping bed; there are lamps on them closer to the bed, and near the door there is meat and garbage accumulates. In the middle there is a passage about a meter and a half wide.
The hut is usually occupied by two families, one living on the right, the other on the left. Each housewife has her own bowl lamp, near which she sits on a bed, cooks, sews, etc. They cook food on the lamp, melt snow for drinking, dry clothes, etc. Usually, two more small lamps are placed for warmth: one in a passage near the entrance to the hut to warm the cold air coming through the door, another - in the far part of the sleeping bed. A lamp-bowl, or grease pot, is carved from soapstone, and its shape varies depending on separate groups Eskimos.
Eskimos sleep with their heads towards the door; When they lie down, they put their clothes, except for shoes, in a bed on the edge of the bed, under the skins. In a two-family hut, each family occupies half of the bunk. Women lie along its edges, small children are laid next to it, then men lie, and in the middle are large children or guests. Each family is covered with one blanket, made from several reindeer skins. Sometimes fur sleeping bags are used. At night, the entrance to the hut is blocked by a large snow block, which stands in the passage during the day. Until the homeowners themselves move it away, it is considered indecent to visit them.
The Reindeer Eskimos did not use bowl lamps; they illuminated their snow huts with a smoking tallow candle, the wick of which was twisted from moss and dipped in melted reindeer tallow. They cooked it on fires made from bushes. For cooking, they set up a kitchen in front of the living hut with completely vertical walls so that they would not melt from the flames of the fire; It happened that the Eskimos could not get fuel for several days, then they ate only frozen meat. In order to always have water for drinking, the reindeer Eskimos built snow-covered huts on the shore of the lake, in the ice of which they always maintained an open hole, protected by a snow cap. They had nothing to dry their shoes on, so they dried them at night in their bosoms.
Fire was previously produced by carving, striking a piece of sulfur pyrite with a piece of iron; cotton grass fluff, fluffy willow rams, and dry moss sprinkled with lard were used as tinder. Making fire by rotating a wooden beam was known, but was rarely used.
If several families unite together, then they build a common snow house different ways: or individual huts are connected by snow tunnels, so that their inhabitants can communicate with each other without going out into the air; or make two rooms with one entrance; or they build several intersecting domes, then cutting out common segments, and in this way, instead of small isolated huts, they get a complex building of three to five rooms in which several families live, a total of 20-25 or more people.
The snow huts on the east coast of Baffin Island have been especially improved. They have a window cut above the entrance, mostly semicircular in shape, covered with a membrane of carefully sewn seal intestines; Sometimes a peephole is left in the middle of the membrane so that you can look out, and a plate is inserted into it freshwater ice(it is obtained by freezing water in a seal skin). As soon as the hut is built, it is insulated with seal skins; often it's old tire from a summer tent; it is held in place by short ropes or straps passed through the snow arch and secured on the outside with bone sticks.
In a snow hut with an inner tire, the temperature can be raised to 20 ° C with the help of a fat pan, whereas without it - only to 2-3 ° above zero. The passage to the hut consists of two, rarely three, small vaults. On the left is a closet for storing clothes and dog harness and a pantry where supplies of meat and fat are kept. Such storerooms are sometimes built to the right and at the back of the hut.
Snow huts were undoubtedly known in the Thule era, as can be seen from a large number found snow knives that were used in the construction of igloos, but apparently served only as temporary shelter during movements. The development of snow huts is associated with the active life of seal hunters, who are often forced to set up camps on sea ice away from the coast; snow huts were also necessary for the reindeer Eskimos; they have reached a high degree of perfection. Typically, Europeans and Americans who go on long winter trips take Eskimos with them to build snow huts along the way.
In Alaska, the Eskimos lived in quadrangular half-dugouts with a wooden base. To build such a dwelling, they dug a quadrangular hole more than a meter deep, at the corners of which pillars up to 4 m high were placed. Then walls were built from boards. The roof was made of thick logs. A window was left in the middle of the roof - square hole. The floor was made of planks. There was space left in the middle for a fireplace. The smoke hole was a window. In northern Alaska, the kitchen was located on the side of a long underground corridor that led to the dwelling. Among the Kodiak people, the entrance to the dwelling was above ground and was a square hole one meter in size. The outside of the dwelling was covered with turf and covered with earth.
The interior decoration of the Alaskan Eskimo home was simple. The main furniture was 1.5 m wide bunks raised above the floor. Eskimos usually slept across the bunks, with their feet against the wall. Several families lived in one dwelling. Each family had its own place on the bunk, separated from the other by a mat woven from grass.
Household items, fat reserves in bladders and other supplies were stored under the bunks of each family. Special storerooms have also existed for a long time. In the North, in permafrost conditions, meat reserves were usually stored in special pits; Often these holes were dug on the side of the corridor leading to the dwelling. Sometimes the storeroom was located at the entrance to the corridor. Storerooms were also built in the form of platforms on wooden piles driven into the ground to protect supplies from both wolves and their dogs. A kayak, sled, skis, etc. were also placed on the platform.
In Greenland, apparently under the influence of the Norwegians and Icelanders, quadrangular buildings with more advanced laying were erected stone walls, rising to a height of 2 m. They became less deepened into the ground. On winter period V big house 2-11 families united. Depending on this, the sizes of significant dwellings of the Greenlandic Eskimos ranged from 4 X 8 to 6 X 18 m. Often in Greenland the entire village consisted of one house 1. Not far from the house, each family had its own stone barn, in which supplies of meat and fish were stored. Between the houses of the village there were pyramids and pillars made of stone; they replaced wooden poles and served to maintain leather canoes upside down at a certain height above the ground.
In the summer, the Eskimos lived and partly still live in tents; the poles for them, when there is a shortage of forests, are often made up of several parts, and in those areas where there is no wood, the Eskimos steam the poles and harpoon shafts in hot water deer antlers and place knee on knee until you get the desired length; or they make tent frames from walrus and whale bones, tying them with straps. When pitching a tent, two pairs of converging poles are placed: one at the entrance, the second at the front edge of the bed; a horizontal longitudinal pole is tied to them, serving as a ridge; the remaining poles are leaned against the second pair obliquely in a semicircle and this frame is covered with a tightly fitted cover made of seal or deer skins. The floors of the tires at the entrance overlap one another to prevent the wind. The bottom of the tire is secured with heavy stones.
In the Bering Strait region, the Eskimos do not live in tents in the summer, but in light wooden houses.