• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Greenland; Hudson; Hudson Bay; Hudson Strait; Stefansson; Barrow; Dorset culture; eskimo*; Newfoundland; Point Barrow; Thule; Thule culture; Alaska; Siberia
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.567.8949; http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/arctic7-3%264-296.pdf

I F anthropological research in the Arctic is to achieve its broadest aims it must be concerned with such basic problems as when, where, and under what circumstances man first penetrated the far north; the ecological conditions encountered during his occupancy of the region; the mechanical, economic, and social adaptations that enabled the Eskimo, the most typical of the arctic peoples, to devise a pattern of life uniquely suited to arctic conditions; the physical and cultural relationships between the Eskimo and other peoples, and how and why their culture changed in the course of time. The practical approach to these underlying problems is through archaeology- the discovery and excavation of early Eskimo or pre-Eskimo sites which will show us how these people lived in the past. In the following summary 1 will discuss briefly the current status of arctic archaeology, pointing to present accomplish-ments and further problems toward which research should be directed. The first systematic archaeological work in the Arctic was that of Mathiassen (1927) who excavated at old Eskimo village sites north and west of Hudson Bay in 1922-3. The result was the discovery of the prehistoric Thule culture, which was closer to that of Alaska and Greenland than it was to the culture of the present-day Central Eskimo. Mathiassen therefore con-cluded that the Thule people had come originally from the west, either from Siberia or Alaska, and moved into the Central Arctic around 1,000 years ago. In 1925 Jenness (1925) described another prehistoric Eskimo culture, the Dorset, which was older than and very different from the Thule. Centering around Hudson Strait, he Dorset culture extended south to Newfoundland and north to northwestern Greenland. The first excavations in the Western Arctic were made in 1912 by Stefansson, who worked at Birnirk, an old site near Point Barrow (Stefansson, 1914). Later evidence indicates that the Birnirk was the Alaskan stage of culture ancestral to Thule (Collins, 1940). Jenness ’ excavations in 1926 ...