Archeological Work in Arctic Canada 



By Henry B. Collins 



Bureau, of American Ethnology 

 Smithsonian Institution 



[With 14 plates] 



Southampton Island, a bleak and treeless land mass some 17,000 

 square miles in extent, forms the northwestern boundary of Hudson 

 Bay, separating it from Foxe Channel and Foxe Basin to the north. 

 Though the island is 50 miles below the Arctic Circle, its shores remain 

 icebound for about eight months of the year, and its climate, vegeta- 

 tion, flora, and fauna are all typically Arctic. 



The island is of particular interest to archeology for two reasons. It 

 was the home of a strange, primitive tribe of Eskimos — the 

 Sadlermiut — who became extinct in 1903 before they had been studied 

 by ethnologists. And long before this, in prehistoric times, the island 

 had been occupied by two other groups of Eskimos, those of the 

 Thule and Dorset cultures. The Thule people had come originally 

 from Alaska, about 800 years ago, and were commonly assumed to 

 have been the ancestors of the Sadlermiuts. The Dorsets were a little- 

 known Eskimo people of markedly different culture who had occupied 

 the central and eastern Arctic long before the arrival of the Thule 

 migrants from the west. This was the locale and these the problems 

 selected by our 1954 expedition to Southampton Island, sponsored by 

 the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of Canada, and 

 the National Geographic Society. We hoped to obtain information 

 on the early inhabitants of the island and the different ecological, 

 climatic, and cultural conditions that had prevailed there at different 

 times in the past, on the physical type of the old populations, and on 

 the cultural relationships between the three Eskimo groups — Dorset, 

 Thule, and Sadlermiut. 



We planned to establish camp at Tunermiut (Native Point), 40 

 miles down the coast from Coral Harbour, and spend the greater part 

 of the summer excavating at a large abandoned Sadlermiut site and 

 a smaller Dorset culture site that had been reported there (Bird, 1953) . 

 In midsummer we planned to charter an Eskimo Peterhead boat for 

 a trip over to uninhabited Coats Island to the south, where the 



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