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Implications of Radiocarbon Datings for the Origin of the Dorset Culture*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Bernard G. Hoffman
Bernard G. Hoffman*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, California
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Extract

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).

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , July 1952 , pp. 15 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1952

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Footnotes

*

Since this paper was written, Ritchie's article “Ground Slates: Indian or Eskimo?,” Pennsylvania Archaeologist, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1951 has appeared. Ritchie's conclusions agree with those of this paper, although the problem was approached differently.

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