ARCHEOLOGICAL WORK IN ARCTIC CANADA — COLLINS 527 



typical Dorset artifacts, mostly stone, and large numbers of stone 

 flakes with retouched edges such as had been found at T 1, and which 

 were also probably Dorset. In contrast we found only three artifacts 

 that were unquestionably Sadlermiut and seven others that were non- 

 Dorset and therefore probably Sadlermiut. Eight of the non-Dorset 

 artifacts came from House 2, the recent-looking house that was irreg- 

 ularly cloverleaf in shape; however, the bulk of the material from 

 this house, found on and between the floor stones, was Dorset. The 

 other two non-Dorset objects were found in House 4, together with 

 several Dorset pieces, also from the floor area. The three oldest-look- 

 ing houses (Nos. 1, 3, and 5) yielded only Dorset material, though 

 little digging was done in the last two. No work was done hi House 

 6 and no artifacts were found in or around it; this well-preserved 

 cloverleaf -shaped house, typically Sadlermiut in form, may well have 

 been built by the Sadlermiuts. 



The few Sadlermiut artifacts that we found in Houses 2 and 4 and 

 the apparently larger amount of such material reported by the British 

 Canadian- Arctic Expedition indicate that some of the Walrus Island 

 houses had been occupied by Sadlermiut Eskimos, probably around the 

 beginning of the present century. Such an occupation, however, 

 would have been secondary, for our excavations, which revealed Dorset 

 material in the floor areas of Houses 2 and 4, as well as in Houses 1, 

 3, and 5, showed that the Dorset people were the original occupants of 

 these houses. 



If the Dorsets had lived in the houses originally they also in all prob- 

 ability had built them. The Walrus Island ruins thus provide the 

 first adequate information on Dorset house types. One of the houses 

 that contained Dorset material, No. 2, was of the cloverleaf shape char- 

 acteristic of many Sadlermiut houses. This suggests that the Sadler- 

 miut may have derived their principal house type, like other features 

 of their culture, from the Dorset. It lends weight to the supposition 

 that the Sadlermiut were culturally, perhaps even physically, de- 

 scended from the mysterious Dorset people, who now appear to have 

 represented the basic, dominant Eskimo population in the eastern part 

 of the Canadian Arctic. The Walrus Island finds thus rounded out 

 the cultural reconstruction previously established at Native Point. 

 There, at the proto-Dorset site T 1 and at the somewhat later site T 3, 

 we had been able to trace the earlier history of the Dorset Eskimos and 

 obtain an insight into Dorset culture in the process of formation. The 

 excavations at these early sites, plus those at the later, classic Dorset 

 site T 2 and the Sadlermiut site, had thus brought to view a picture of 

 cultural development and continuity over a period of 2,000 years. 



