SECRETARY'S REPORT 37 



spent a week reviewing the activities of the field office and laboratory 

 and assisting in the preparation of plans for the summer field season. 

 Toward the end of June Dr. Eoberts again went to the headquarters 

 at Lincoln to assist in the preparations for sending parties to the field 

 and started on an inspection trip through the Missouri Basin in com- 

 pany with Dr. John M. Corbett and Paul Beaubien of the National 

 Park Service. At the end of June the group was at Cherokee, Iowa, 

 where Dr. Reynold J. Ruppe, Jr., of the University of Iowa, was 

 directing a joint party of the University and the Sanford Museum in 

 excavations at an archeological site on Mill Creek. 



At the beginning of the fiscal year Dr. Henry B. Collins, anthro- 

 pologist, was in the Canadian Arctic, conducting archeological work 

 on Southampton Island in Hudson Bay. The expedition was spon- 

 sored jointly by the Smithsonian Institution, the National Geographic 

 Society, and the National Museum of Canada. Dr. Collins was as- 

 sisted by Dr. J. N. Emerson, assistant professor of anthropology. Uni- 

 versity of Toronto, William E. Taylor, Jr., research assistant. Museum 

 of Anthropology, University of Michigan, and Eugene Ostroii, pho- 

 tographer, of Washington, D. C. 



The party left Coral Harbour, Southampton Island, on June 25, 

 traveling by dog team over the sea ice, and camped for the greater part 

 of the summer at Native Point, 40 miles down the coast. This aban- 

 doned Eskimo village of 85 stone and sod house ruins was once the 

 principal settlement of the Sadlermiut Eskimos, who became extinct 

 in 1903. Excavation of selected house ruins, graves, and midden areas 

 yielded a valuable collection of cultural and skeletal material of this 

 little-known Eskimo tribe. 



One mile from the Sadlermiut site, on an 85-foot elevation and 

 almost a mile from the sea, is a much older site of the Dorset culture, 

 probably 1,000 years or more old. Covering an area of well over 20 

 acres, this is the largest Dorset site thus far known. Excavations there 

 yielded thousands of artifacts of stone, ivory, and bone, some of them 

 typically Dorset, others representing types that were new to the Dorset 

 culture. The site represents a phase of Dorset culture different in 

 certain respects from any previously reported. Among the new types 

 were several forms of microlithic blades recalling those of the upper 

 Paleolithic and Mesolithic of Eurasia but not previously found in 

 America. Wood was entirely absent at the site, having disintegrated, 

 and the bird and mammal bones and the ivory, bone, and antler arti- 

 facts were uniformly patinated and weathered, in striking contrast to 

 the fresh, well-preserved similar material from the Sadlermiut site. 

 This suggests a considerable age for the Dorset site and bears out other 

 indications that the Dorset culture in Canada and Greenland flourished 

 at a time when the dim ate was milder than today. 



