The Dorset Culture

Presently, the Arctic regions of Canada are inhabited by the Inuit people, but prior to their appearance, a different group of individuals, known as the Dorset people, dominated the icy lands of the north. They thrived in that region from approximately 500 B.C. to 1000 A.D., but then they gradually went into decline for several reasons. Although the Dorset people lived in the area for more than a millennium, the first evidence proving their existence was not 니ncovered until the early twentieth century. At an archaeological site at Cape Dorset on Baffin Island, numerous strange artifacts clearly from a group of people older than the Inuit were unearthed. In 1925, Canadian anthropologist Diamond Jenness named this newfound culture for the place where the artifacts had been discovered.

The Dorset people were descendants of a group of Arctic denizens known to contemporary archaeologists as Palaeᄋ-Eskimo cultures. The individuals in these cultures lived during a time when the weather was much warmer than today, so they could hunt in the interior parts of the Arctic. Then, around 500 B.C., the Arctic climate changed and became much colder. The Dorset people survived since they managed to adapt to the frigid weather by developing tools and methods to hunt on ice. For instance, knowing that seals surfaced in holes in the ice to breathe oxygen, they would wait patiently by ice holes for their unwary prey to break the water’s surface. They additionally made large harpoons that they utilized to spear walruses living on the shore as well as small whales they attacked from the edge of the ice. Among the whale species they hunted from shore—there is no evidence that they constructed boats to hunt whales from—were the beluga and narwhal.

Occasionally, the Dorset people remained on the ice to hunt and collect meat for long periods of time, so, to survive, they developed the snow house, which is more commonly known as the igloo, and burned blubber to keep warm. The blubber was burned in soapstone lamps that the Dorset people carved and which have the appearance of small bowls. To assist their movement on the ice, the Dorset people developed sled shoes made of bone and ivory that enabled them to slide along the ice like modern-day ice skaters, and they created what appear to be crampons made from the jawbones and teeth of some animals they hunted.

Since they needed to be near their food s니pply，the Dorset people mainly resided near the shores of the Arctic Ocean on the modern-day Canadian mainland, but small groups of others lived on the many islands comprising the Arctic Archipelago. The biggest settlements were located near waters where sea mammals still thrive today. There is no evidence that the Dorset people ever made their homes in the interior of the Canadian Arctic. As for their permanent homes, they primarily constructed them with stones and turf. First, they dug a foundation about half a meter into the ground, and then they utilized dug-니p turf and nearby large stones for the walls. The roof was a frame of driftwood or animal bones covered with

Actual Test 02

animal hides. While Dorset settlements were not large, different groups of them maintained contact with one another and traded items made from jade, copper, quartz, and iron from meteorites.

The Dorset people relied on the sea, winter ice, and mammals that lived near them for their s니rvival. When the northern area experienced a warming period around 1000, the ice began forming later in autumn and breaking up earlier in spring and additionally failed to cover much of the ocean, which left long stretches of water the Dorset people were unable to cross to reach their traditional hunting areas. Simultaneously, the warming period allowed the ancestors of the modern-day Inuit, called the Thule people, to migrate from Alaska. 丁hey had dogs and large sleds and had learned to hunt large whales from boats on the ocean. Able to provide plenty of food for themselves, the Thule people’s population expanded, and they engaged in direct competition with the Dorset people. The combination of the warm weather and the Thule people caused the Dorset people to go into terminal decline, and they vanished entirely sometime between 1200 and 1500.