This beautiful object was found in the far western Canadian Arctic, on Herschel Island off the coast of Yukon Territory, just east of the Alaska-Yukon border. While Herschel Island is now an uninhabited provincial park, it had been used by prehistoric peoples and Inuvialuit for thousands of years.

Thule Culture art is renowned for its elegantly fashioned tools and personal implements, simply but beautifully decorated with abstract symbolic designs. The best known Thule comb, carved in the shape of a beautiful woman, has with a similar engraved border pattern and overall shape, is in the collection of the Itsanitaq Museum (formerly Eskimo Museum) in Churchill, Manitoba (see references). Judging from the smoothness of the broken edge, this elegant comb fragment probably dates from the Thule period, though it may be a somewhat later (18th-19th century) Inuvialuit example closely following the Thule form and design tradition.

References: For a well-known Thule Culture comb with a similar border pattern and overall shape in the collection of the Itsanitaq Museum (formerly Eskimo Museum) in Churchill, Manitoba see Canadian Eskimo Arts Council, Sculpture Inuit: masterworks of the Canadian Arctic, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), fig. 68; see also George Swinton, Sculpture of the Inuit, (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972, revised 1992), fig. 166. Comb forms similar to our example have been found in other parts of the Canadian Arctic. See Franz Boas, The Central Eskimo, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 151 for examples from the Central Arctic.

The consignor of this lot has asked that the proceeds from its sale be donated to the Minwaashin Lodge in Ottawa, an Indigenous women's support centre that provides a range of programs and services to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women survivors of domestic and other forms of violence. For additional information, see https://www.minlodge.com/