Dorset (culture)
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The Dorset culture preceded the Inuit culture in Arctic North America. Inuit legends mention a people called the Tuniit (singular, tuniq), or sometimes Sivullirmiut, which were driven away by the Inuit. According to legend, they were "giants", people who were taller and stronger than the Inuit, but who were easily scared off and retreated from the advancing Inuit. Researchers believe that Dorset culture lacked dogs, boats and other technologies and adapted poorly to the development of harsher weather in the Arctic in the late first and early second millennium. As a result, they were displaced by the Inuit.
Anthropologist Diamond Jenness in 1925 received some odd artifacts from Cape Dorset, Nunavut, which seemed to derive from an ancient lifestyle unlike that of the Inuit. Jenness named the culture after the location of the find.
The Sadlermiut
In 1824, HMS Griper, under Captain George Francis Lyon, anchored off Cape Pembroke on Coats Island in Hudson Bay. The whalers discovered a band of Eskimos who spoke a "strange dialect" and were called Sadlermiut. (Sallirmiut in modern Inuktitut spelling, from Salliq, the Inuktitut name for the settlement of Coral Harbour, Nunavut.)
The Sadlermiut, living in near isolation on and around Southampton Island, preserved a culture distinct from the Inuit. They continued to have contact with Westerners and contracted Western diseases. By 1896, there were only 70 of them remaining. In the fall of 1902, some of them visited the Active, a whaling vessel that had stopped at Southampton Island. They caught a disease from a sick sailor, possibly typhoid or typhus. The entire community died within weeks.
In 1954 and 1955, Henry B. Collins of the Smithsonian Institution studied Eskimo house ruins in the Canadian Arctic. He determined that these ruins were characteristic of Sadlermiut culture which had once been quite extensive. He also found evidence that the Sadlermiut were the last remnants of the Dorset culture. Recent genetic research has, moreover, confirmed the genetic connection between the Sadlermiut and the Dorset culture. Surprisingly, there was no genetic connection between the Dorset culture and the Inuit culture, which indicates the complete replacement and extinction of the Dorsets.
External link
- In the bones of the world (http://www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavut020705/news/editorial/columns.html) at the Nuntsiaq News website.
- Article on the Sadlermiut from the Canadian encyclopedia (http://www.canadianencyclopedia.ca/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0007041)de:Dorset (Kultur)