Implications of Radiocarbon Datings for the Origin of the Dorset Culture
Since its discovery by Jenness in 1925, the Dorset culture has presented students of Eskimo archaeology with a persistent problem. Apparently representing an Arctic land-hunting culture, centering in the eastern Arctic, and containing many cultural items also to be found in more southern Indian cult...
| Published in: | American Antiquity |
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| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge University Press (CUP)
1952
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/276238 https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0002731600013433 |
| Summary: | Since its discovery by Jenness in 1925, the Dorset culture has presented students of Eskimo archaeology with a persistent problem. Apparently representing an Arctic land-hunting culture, centering in the eastern Arctic, and containing many cultural items also to be found in more southern Indian cultures, the Dorset culture has presented ample opportunity for conjectural reconstructions of its origins and affinities. Mathiassen, who collected Dorset materials from Bylot and Southampton islands, first considered Dorset merely as a localized and specialized phase of the Thule culture (Mathiassen, 1925, part 1, pp. 206-12, 258-60; part 2, pp. 164-65). Later, however, he came to regard Dorset as non-Eskimo, and as a culture both influenced by, and influencing, Thule (Mathiassen and Holtved, 1936, p. 130). Jenness originally regarded Dorset as a paleo-Eskimo form of the proto-Eskimo culture of the Arctic Interior (Jenness, 1933, p. 365), but later shifted to the viewpoint that Dorset was a genuine Eskimo culture–albeit showing some Indian influences–which was distantly related to the cultures of Western Alaska (Jenness, 1940, p. 9). That this was the case has been repeatedly assumed as proved by de Laguna (1946, p. 106; 1947, pp. 13-14, 284-85). |
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