oups, the time of year, and survival opportunities in a given area. Permanent villages of stone houses existed in Greenland and in Alaska. Villages along the Siberian shore were made up of houses composed of driftwood and earth. In the central areas there are no settled communities, but some groups returned to the same area-a favorite fishing or hunting site-year after year.
             In all Eskimo areas an annual cycle took place in which groups spent the harsh winters together in a larger settlement and then broke into smaller, family-sized bands during the summer. These seasonal groupings of settlements occurred in Greenland and western Alaska; during the summer, people would leave their permanent communities and live in animal-skin tents at favorite spots for seal hunting, for fishing, or for collecting birds, eggs, and plants. The igloo (from an Eskimo word meaning "home") was constructed of packed snow and used only during the winter, when villages of these structures were built on the firm ocean ice of the central Arctic to assist in seal hunting through holes in the ice. These types of dwellings were also used for temporary structures in Greenland and in parts of Canada and Alaska.
             Traditional Eskimo subsistence patterns were closely associated with the annual cycle of changing seasons. The
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