Dorset culture

The Dorset culture was the last of the great Paleo-Inuit traditions of the North American Arctic, flourishing from about 500 BCE until sometime between 1000 and 1500 CE. Its people hunted seals and other sea mammals from the Canadian Arctic islands to Greenland, Labrador and Newfoundland, and they left behind some of the finest small carvings of the ancient north before the Thule, ancestors of the Inuit, took over their lands.

The culture was recognised in 1925, when the anthropologist Diamond Jenness examined objects sent to him from Cape Dorset, the Nunavut community now called Kinngait. They looked unlike anything Inuit made, and he concluded that they belonged to an older people, which he named after the place of discovery. Inuit oral tradition already spoke of earlier inhabitants called the Tuniit, described in some stories as tall and strong but shy, and many scholars link these accounts with the Dorset.

Where the Dorset came from is not fully settled. They may have grown out of the earlier Pre-Dorset or Saqqaq cultures, or less probably Independence I. One puzzle is that those predecessors used the bow and arrow and the bow drill, while the Dorset apparently had neither, cutting long, narrow holes in bone needles by gouging rather than drilling. Archaeologists divide Dorset history into an early phase (about 500 BCE to 1 CE), a middle phase (1 to 500 CE), a late phase (500 to 1000 CE) and possibly a terminal phase after about 1000.

The Dorset way of life was built around the ice. They seldom hunted land animals such as caribou or polar bears and seem instead to have taken seals at breathing holes, along with walrus and narwhal. Harpoons tipped with small triangular stone end-blades are a hallmark of their sites, as are burins, chisel-edged flakes used to work bone, wood and ivory. Soapstone lamps burning seal oil lit and warmed their dwellings. The culture was strikingly uniform across the Canadian Arctic, with regional variants in Greenland and in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Dorset carvers produced tiny, detailed figures of people and animals and powerful masks. Many archaeologists read these as signs of a strong shamanic tradition. Human figures sometimes show women with very large hairstyles and people of both sexes in hoodless parkas with tall collars.

The Medieval Warm Period, which began warming the Arctic from around the mid-tenth century, made sea ice less reliable and may have badly disrupted a people so dependent on it. At the same time Thule migrants were moving east from Alaska. Radiocarbon dates show Dorset people still near Cambridge Bay around 1350, after Thule groups had arrived there about 1200. A 2014 genetic study of nineteen Dorset individuals found no sign of interbreeding with the Thule, or with the Norse settlers of Greenland, and concluded that the Thule had fully replaced them by about 1300. Whether the two peoples met, traded or fought is debated; some Inuit elders recall peace with an ancient people, others conflict. The Sadlermiut of Hudson Bay, who died out in 1902–03 after contact with Europeans and their diseases, were once thought to be the last Dorset, but a 2012 genetic study found no link.

Our maps draw an approximate Dorset area in 500 CE and from 800 to 1400 in the eastern Arctic. Earlier maps show the wider Paleo-Inuit world it came from, and the Inuit of the 1492 map descend from the Thule who followed. Its southern neighbours included the Beothuk of Newfoundland and the Innu.