514 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1956 



Sadlermiuts, mainly seals, walrus, caribou, and polar bears, and addi- 

 tional thousands of such bones were visible in the bottom of a shallow 

 pond which dried up before the summer was over (pi. 2, B). Stone 

 cairns and meat caches by the hundreds were found along the beach in 

 front of the site and on the old shorelines for miles around. Human 

 burials, numbering well over 100, were to be seen at the site itself and 

 along the adjacent beach ridges. The burials within the village were 

 of the surface variety ; the bodies had been laid on the surface of the 

 ground and merely surrounded by a row of stones. Away from the 

 village the bodies had been placed in carefully constructed vaults of 

 limestone slabs (pi. 3). Human skulls and bones were also visible in 

 some of the house ruins. These were the remains of the very last of 

 the Sadlermiuts, who died here in the epidemic of 1902-3. Most of 

 the graves, however, were made of stones that were heavily incrusted 

 with lichens and were probably more than a hundred years old. 



To excavate a site of such magnitude completely and carefully would 

 have required years of work by a party far larger than ours. How- 

 ever, our plans did not call for extensive excavations. We wished only 

 to sample the houses and middens, digging enough to give us a rounded 

 picture of Sadlermiut culture and leaving the bulk of the site intact 

 for future archeologists. We planned to dig only two houses, Num- 

 ber 37, which appeared to be one of the most recent, and Number 30, 

 one of the oldest (pi. 4). The excavation of these houses and of 

 selected midden areas and graves yielded a large collection of artifacts 

 which provided the essential information needed. Some of the Sadler- 

 miut artifacts are illustrated on plate 5. 



The Sadlermiuts have been one of the puzzles of Eskimo ethnology. 

 They were first described by the British explorer Capt. G. F. Lyon, 

 who met them in 1824 on the southwest coast of Coats Island, which 

 then and for many years later was thought to be a part of Southampton 

 Island. American, English, and Scotch whalers began operating in 

 Hudson Bay in the 1860's, but as far as known they rarely came into 

 contact with the Sadlermiuts who, probably because of their isolation, 

 remained aloof from other Eskimos as well as whites. Three of the 

 whalers, Captains Comer (1910), Munn (1919), and Ferguson (1938), 

 published brief observations on the Sadlermiut, and a number of their 

 typical artifacts, collected by Comer, were described by Boas (1901-7) . 

 In 1922 the Danish archeologist Dr. Therkel Mathiassen while ex- 

 cavating on the north side of Southampton Island, obtained valuable 

 information on the Sadlermiut from two old Aivilik Eskimos who had 

 lived for a few years among them (Mathiassen, 1927). 



The Sadlermiut population seems to have declined steadily after 

 the coming of the whalers. In 1896 Capt. Comer estimated their 

 number at 70, most of them living at settlements on the south side of 



