30 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1954 



times. However, Dr. Collins's excavations have shown that some 

 centuries ago when living conditions were better, Cornwallis Island 

 had been occupied by two distinct groups of prehistoric Eskimos, the 

 Thule and Dorset. The remains visible on the surface — the ruins of 

 solidly built houses of stones, whale bones, and turf — are those of the 

 Thule people. The Dorset occupation, which preceded Thule, was 

 indicated by a buried sod line within and below which w^ere found the 

 stone, bone, and ivory implements characteristic of that culture. 

 Thule material was found above the old sod line. The Dorset artifacts 

 were different in type from the Thule and were also more deeply 

 patinated, being dark brown or gray in contrast to the light cream- 

 colored Thule objects. The same was true of the animal bones; those 

 from the Dorset level were more weathered in appearance, darker 

 colored, and lighter in weight than the relatively fresh-looking bones 

 from the upper part of the midden. The marked difference in the 

 state of preservation of the animal bones and artifacts suggests that 

 after the Dorset occupation the site had been abandoned for some 

 centuries before the Thule Eskimos established their village on the 

 same spot. Samples of sod, soil, charcoal, wood, bones, skin, and 

 other organic materials were collected for possible dating by radio- 

 carbon and pollen analyses. 



Dr. Collins prepared a preliminary report describing the 1953 

 excavations for the Annual Report of the National Museum of 

 Canada. His booklet "Arctic Area," a summary of existing knowl- 

 edge of the ethnology, archeology, physical anthropology, and 

 linguistics of the Eskimos and Northern Indians, was published by 

 the Comision de Historia of Mexico as one of the unit studies in its 

 Program of the History of America. Other papers included a 

 critique of the role of Ipiutak in Eskimo culture and an evaluation of 

 the recently developed technique of lexico-statistics in relation to the 

 archeological evidence. This new linguistic technique, which at- 

 tempts to estimate the time of separation, or age, of related languages 

 on the basis of vocabulary change, produces results for the Arctic area 

 that are in close agreement with the evidence of two other dating 

 techniques — dendrochronology and radiocarbon analysis — as well as 

 with Dr. Collins's previous reconstruction of culture growths, con- 

 tacts, and population movements in the Eskimo area as deduced from 

 archeology. 



Dr. Collins continued to serve as chairman of the directing commit- 

 tee supervising the work on the Arctic Bibliography, which the Arctic 

 Institute of North America is preparing for the Department of De- 

 fense under contract with Office of Naval Research. The first three 

 volumes of the Bibliography, of approximately 1,500 pages each, were 

 issued by the Government Printing Office in August 1953. They list 

 and summarize the index contents of 20,000 of the more important 



