Dorset Settlement Patterns in Newfoundland and Southeastern Hudson Bay

Extract

The history of dorset eskimo archaeological research now spans a half-century and appears to be fully mature. At the outset, progress in this research was sporadic, but in the last two decades momentum has increased and we have achieved many significant clarifications of the general Dorset problem. These include a firm definition of Dorset people as true Eskimos, and further insights with respect to their temporal and geographic spread throughout the central and eastern Arctic, their localized adaptations to changing environments, and, as a persistent theme, their noteworthy cultural conservatism through time. This paper deals primarily with the middle and late stages of Dorset culture as seen in marginal settlements in western Newfoundland and southeastern Hudson Bay.

In reviewing past investigations of Arctic prehistory, I have been struck by our substantive preoccupation with material culture, mainly with artifacts. That is quite natural because our powers of interpretation and reconstruction are circumscribed in well-known ways by the paucity of our field data, particularly so as we are dealing with the cultures of Arctic hunter-gatherers. Therefore, we should be forgiven a natural tendency to submerge in the warm realities of artifacts and the comforting procedures of mensuration and taxonomy. These are legitimate scientific concerns, and they may lead us toward useful statistical formulations, definitions of cultural parameters and complexes, and so on. However, to the extent that we think solely in such statistical and materialistic terms, the fundamental human nature of our quest may be diminished, if not lost altogether.