390 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1940 



Let US examine these early eastern and "western cultures more 

 closely. In both the Dorset and the Old Bering Sea, but not in later 

 remains, we find incurved side scrapers and trapezoidal knives of 

 chipped chert, small slate implements with rubbed edges" that may 

 have been boot creasers, and rubbing stones of polished crystalline 

 rock, quartz in the east and basalt in the west. From an Aleutian 

 shell heap, again, Hrdlicka has brought back such typical Dorset 

 types as small leaf-shaped blades notched on each side of the base, 

 knives with curving edges like miniature hunting knives, and points 

 with concave bases, the only difference being that the Aleutian speci- 

 mens are chipped from crude basalt instead of the more amenable 

 chert and quartz. One Aleutian knife (?) even has three notches on 

 each side of the base, as we find on a few Dorset specimens also,^^ 



Now we must not forget that in addition to these special forms 

 known only from the east and the far west, the Dorset culture pos- 

 sesses many other old Eskimo traits, such as toggle harpoon heads, 

 eyed needles and tubular needle cases, chipped end scrapers, polished 

 stone adz heads and adzlike scrapers, barbed bone fish-spear points, 

 stone lamps and pots, and even "jumping stones."^^ It is true that 

 some of these objects have peculiar shapes, but there are others hardly 

 distinguishable from Eskimo types elsewhere. Furthermore, the Dor- 

 set people possessed in full measure the skill of other Eskimo in carv- 

 ing bone and ivory, for in 1937 Rowley brought back from Iglulik, 

 on the northwest coast of Hudson Bay, some excellent figurines of 

 Dorset manufacture that rival in worlonanship similar figurines from 

 any period of Eskimo history.^* 



In view of all this, are we not justified in suspecting, not merely 

 that the Dorset culture is genuinely Eskimo, but that it has stemmed 

 from the same parent trimk as the ancient cultures of western 

 Alaska? 



If we accept this reasoning, then we must believe that the ancestors 

 of the Dorset people separated from the western Eskimo before the 

 flowering of the Old Bering Sea culture about the beginning of the 

 Christian Era. This would date their entry into Canada not later 

 than the first millennium B. C, and possibly even in the second mil- 

 lennium. The closing centuries of the second millennium B. C. 

 appear in fact the more probable if, as I have already suggested, it 

 was an invasion of Athapaskan tribes that pushed the Dorset people 



" In the Dorset cnlture imploments of both slate and chert. 



"At Kachcmak Bay de Laguna found the following Dorset types: Planing adz blade, 

 chipped asynimotric knife blade with notched tang, one type of harpoon head, needle, and 

 dart beads barbed symmetrically and asymmetrically on both sides. (Fredorica de Laguna, 

 Archaeology of Cook Inlet, Alaska, p. 213, 19o4.) 



J* "Jumping stones" have been discovered in Newfoundland and, more recently, inland 

 from Hudson Bay, In the territory of the Caribou Eskimo. 



"Bowley, Graham, The Dorset culture of the eastern Arctic. Ann. Anthrop., vol. 42, 

 No. 3, pt. 1, pp. 490-499, July-Sept., 1940. 



