The Dorset Culture

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On a low ridge of soapstone on an island in Hudson Strait, more than a hundred and fifty faces stare straight up out of the rock. They have foreheads and cheeks and open mouths, and there they stop — no ears, no hair, no bodies, some with horns rising from the crown, some halfway between a person and an animal. They have been looking north at the Arctic sky for something close to a thousand years, and the hands that cut them belonged to a people who left no language anyone alive can read. This is Qajartalik, the northernmost rock art on the continent, and it is the largest single thing the Dorset ever made.

The smallest thing they made would fit in a closed hand. It is a polar bear in walrus ivory, caught in an elongated pose that reads at once as swimming and as flight, the body stretched and the head thrust forward — and along its length the carver has incised the animal’s own skeleton, rib by rib, and cut a small slot at the throat. Between the ridge of pecked faces and the thumb-sized bear lies almost everything that can be known about the Dorset, a self-sufficient hunting people of the far North who vanished before the Inuit oral record began, and who are recovered now through three channels that seldom agree and here, unusually, do: the ground, the memory of the people who came after, and the DNA in old bone.

The first inhabitants

The Dorset were the last of the Paleo-Inuit — the deep run of Arctic peoples who held the North American far North before the ancestors of the modern Inuit arrived. “Paleo-Inuit” is the current term; the older literature, and most of the genetic papers, still say “Paleo-Eskimo,” an exonym now avoided, kept here only where a cited study uses it. In Inuit memory these predecessors are the Tuniit — a single Tuniq, a whole people the Sivullirmiut, “the first inhabitants.” They are not the Inuit and not the ancestors of the Inuit. They are the people the Inuit found already in the country.

The Dorset grew out of the older Arctic Small Tool tradition, the toolkit that first carried people across the whole span of the North American Arctic. Their more immediate forebears were the Pre-Dorset, and their cousins the Saqqaq and Independence cultures of Greenland and the High Arctic. Out of that base the Dorset proper took shape somewhere around 800 to 500 BCE and held on, in places, remarkably late: radiocarbon dates from around Cambridge Bay, in the central Canadian Arctic, run as recent as roughly 1350 CE, and the culture as a whole persisted to somewhere between 1000 and 1500 CE, its exact end blurred by region and by the incompleteness of the record. At their greatest reach the Dorset and their Paleo-Inuit kin occupied the Arctic from the Bering Strait region east across Arctic Canada to Greenland and south to the island of Newfoundland — a territory as wide as a continent, held by never very many people.

The name is modern and accidental. In 1925 the New Zealand-born Canadian anthropologist Diamond Jenness examined a set of artifacts collected around Cape Dorset — now Kinngait — on the south coast of Baffin Island, and saw at once that they were not Inuit. The stone tools were made on a different plan, to a different eye. Jenness proposed that they belonged to an older, separate people, and named that people “Dorset,” after the find-spot. It was a label of convenience, attached to a culture that had no idea it would one day answer to a place on Baffin Island. The people themselves are nameless in their own tongue; “Tuniit” is what the Inuit called the strangers they displaced.

Materially the Dorset are defined as much by what they lacked as by what they had — and the lack is genuinely strange, because some of it they seem to have lost rather than never known. In their later centuries they did not use the bow and arrow. They kept no dog and drove no dog-sled. They did without the large open-water skin boat, the umiaq, and the ethnographic single-hunter qajaq of the later Arctic. And they did not use the bow-drill: nearly every hole in a Dorset object was gouged rather than drilled, leaving a distinctive elongated, lenticular perforation instead of a clean round one — one of the most recognizable fingerprints of the whole culture, and the kind of small technical tell by which an archaeologist can sort a Dorset site from a Thule one at a glance.

None of this made them a poor or a “primitive” people, and the point matters. The Dorset were an intensely cold-adapted, sea-mammal-hunting society, takers of seal at the breathing-hole and the ice edge, of walrus, of whatever the sea and the floe would give. They knapped fine triangular stone end-blades for their harpoons and toggling harpoon heads to hold a struggling seal; they made burin-like tools and microblades, ground implements of slate, and knives shaped for cutting snow. They carved soapstone into the qulliq, the shallow crescent lamp that burned rendered seal oil with a wick of moss and was the light, the heat, and the cooking fire of an Arctic house — the same lamp the Inuit would keep. And in the Middle and Late Dorset periods they raised, from stone and turf, large communal “longhouses,” rectangular structures dozens of meters long that seem to have gathered many families for a season — the nearest thing the Dorset left to a monument to their own social life. The remains of one such structure still lie on the tundra near Cambridge Bay, low walls of set stone tracing a hall on the ground.

The stone remains of a Dorset communal longhouse near Cambridge Bay, Nunavut — one of the large rectangular structures the Late Dorset raised from stone and turf, and among the northernmost sites where Dorset dates run as late as roughly 1350 CE. CambridgeBayWeather, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

What the Tuniit carved

The Dorset are famous for none of this. They are famous for carving — for a body of miniature sculpture in walrus ivory, antler, and bone so concentrated and so charged that it has come to stand for the whole culture. The objects are tiny, most of them between one and ten centimeters, made to be held or worn rather than displayed, and they are worked with a control that has persuaded most archaeologists that behind them stood not idle whittlers but ritual specialists — the makers and dispensers of a spirit-world in the size of a thumb.

The signature object is the bear. Dorset carvers rendered the polar bear again and again in two registers: as a conventionalized, skeletal abstraction, and as a lifelike animal frozen in a pose that suggests swimming, or diving, or flight. On many of them the maker incised the creature’s own skeleton down its surface — a “skeletal” or “X-ray” treatment that shows the frame inside the flesh — and cut a small gouged slot at the throat or the belly, read as the point of a ritual killing or as a “life-line,” the channel of the animal’s vital force. These “flying bears” are widely understood as spirit-bears: the bear crossing between the seen world and the unseen, a helping-spirit of the kind a shaman would know and call on, carried on the body as an amulet. The elongated, airborne-or-diving attitude is exactly the posture that later Arctic tradition assigns to the shaman himself in trance — the spirit-flight of the ritual specialist, or the descent to the floor of the sea where the mistress of the sea animals holds the game. In the Inuit world that came after, that descent is the journey of the angakkuq to Sedna, the sea-mother who keeps the seals and walruses and withholds them when the people break faith; the Dorset carving is often read across the gap as an earlier, kindred image of the same permeable boundary. As the Penn Museum’s account of Dorset shamanism puts it, the flight-or-swimming attitude of the bears matches the methods a shaman used to visit the spirits — and at one excavated site the concentration of such objects in a single dwelling suggested that one person, a shaman-carver, had made most of them and handed them out.

That reading is the mainstream one, and it should be held with a measure of care, which the honest sources supply. The carvings come to us as archaeology — as objects out of the ground, without a text, without a living tradition to explain them, and separated by a genuine gap from the Inuit who might otherwise have carried the key. To call a flying bear a “spirit-bear” is to reason by analogy from the shamanism of a later people, and while the analogy is strong it is still analogy. Some recent researchers have pressed the caution further, arguing that the poses and the skeletal marks may encode close hunting knowledge of the animal — its anatomy, its behavior on the ice — as much as any cosmology, and that the modern habit of seeing shamanic flight in every stretched bear may say as much about us as about the Dorset. The meaning is real; its exact contents are debated.

Around the bears runs a whole population of other figures. There are tiny human faces, sometimes clustered so that several peer out of a single small block — the objects archaeologists call “maskettes,” miniature masks that may themselves have been worn as amulets. There are full masks in wood; human-form figures with the character of “puppets”; antler wands and shafts; and slender tubular objects of ivory of the kind that ethnography links to the shaman’s healing work, the “sucking tube” through which a curer draws sickness from a body. A Dorset site can yield a female figure in ivory with only the upper body shown, or a marine mammal reduced to a few sure planes. Taken together the assemblage reads as the material trace of an active spirit-tradition — the tuurngait, the helping-spirits, and the specialists who dealt with them — described here at the distance the evidence allows, and never as a technique that could be worked.

A Dorset ivory figure of a woman, carved in the Canadian Arctic around the tenth century — one of the small human forms, alongside the “flying” bears and clustered maskettes, that mark the Dorset as an intensely carving people. via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

The largest surviving statement of that tradition is the one the entry opened on. On Qikertaaluk Island off Qajartalik — the name means “where there is a kayak” — a rift of soapstone near Kangiqsujuaq in Nunavik, Arctic Quebec, carries the pecked and incised faces: over 150 by careful count, by some inventories approaching 180, human and animal and hybrid, horned and open-mouthed. The soapstone that took them was also a quarry, worked for the raw stone of lamps and pots, so the sacred surface and the working rock are one body. Attributed to the Dorset on the style of the faces, it is the only place where that palm-sized spirit-art was ever cut into living rock at the scale of a human head, and it is the northernmost rock-art site in North America. In December 2017 it was added to Canada’s tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage (site reference 6339), with the formal nomination submitted the following spring. What the faces meant, precisely, is one of the genuinely open questions of Arctic archaeology; that they meant something, and that the meaning ran through a world of transformation and spirits, is not in serious doubt.

Memory, DNA, and the vanishing

The Dorset are a people known to have ended, and the shape of their ending is unusually well attested, because two very different kinds of record point the same way. Around 1200 CE the Thule — the direct ancestors of today’s Inuit — began to spread east out of Alaska, and they came equipped with everything the late Dorset lacked: the bow, the dog and the sled, the large skin boat for open-water whaling. Within roughly two or three centuries the Dorset were gone from the land. Whether they were killed, starved out, outcompeted for the same seals, or simply overtaken and left behind is not settled; what is clear is that the Dorset world closed as the Thule world opened over the top of it.

Inuit oral tradition kept the memory. The Tuniit are remembered across the eastern Arctic as a real people who had the country first: immensely strong — strong enough, the stories say, to haul a walrus alone across the ice — but shy, timid, inoffensive, easily startled and easily driven off, and in the end pushed out of their lands by the incoming ancestors of the Inuit. The archaeologist Robert McGhee, who did as much as anyone to bring the Tuniit to general readers in his 2004 book The Last Imaginary Place, set the oral memory beside the archaeology and found them describing the same people: as he put it in a short essay on the Tuniit, the strangers of the old stories are “almost certainly” the people whose remains show thousands of years of Arctic occupation from the Bering Strait to Greenland. It is a rare thing for a people to be remembered, by name and character, by those who displaced them.

Modern genetics has sharpened the picture to a hard edge. A landmark ancient-DNA study led by Maanasa Raghavan in Eske Willerslev’s group at the University of Copenhagen, published in Science in 2014 and reported at the time by National Geographic, reconstructed the whole Paleo-Inuit story from the bone. The Paleo-Inuit, it found, arrived in a single migration out of Siberia around 4000 BCE; they then remained genetically near-isolated for some four thousand years, dominated on the maternal side by haplogroup D; and then, about seven hundred years ago, they simply vanished — replaced by the incoming Thule, who carried a different maternal signature, haplogroup A, with virtually no admixture between the two. This was not the usual story of a people absorbed into its successors. It was near-total population replacement: the Thule did not marry the Dorset into themselves so much as move into an emptied land. The finding is dramatic enough that it should be stated soberly and its own uncertainties kept in view; the wide date range, and the exact mechanism of the disappearance, remain the contested edges of an otherwise firm result. Journalists reached, inevitably, for a memorable tag — NBC News and others framed the vanished people as the Arctic’s “long-gone hobbits,” borrowing the language of an isolated, small, replaced population — a phrase best noted and then set down, not adopted.

One long-standing lead was cut by the same wave of genetic work. The Sadlermiut of Southampton Island, in northern Hudson Bay, were a distinct Arctic people who died out with terrible speed in the winter of 1902–03, when an introduced disease carried by a whaling vessel swept through their small population. Because their material culture seemed to blend Dorset-like and Thule elements, the Smithsonian archaeologist Henry B. Collins proposed in the 1950s that the Sadlermiut were the last surviving Dorset — the final Tuniit, holding on into the twentieth century on an isolated island. It was a compelling idea, and it fell to the evidence. As The Canadian Encyclopedia records, ancient-DNA analysis published in 2015 found the Sadlermiut to be genetically Thule/Inuit, not Dorset — a Thule people who had, by some route not yet understood, taken up certain Dorset-like technologies without taking up Dorset ancestry. The “last Dorset” claim is now doubted, and the true last of the Tuniit recede back to around 1300 or 1400, nameless on that emptied land.

Two distinctions have to be kept clean at the end. The Dorset are not the living Inuit or Yup’ik, who are the descendants of the Thule, present-tense peoples with a living and much-revitalized heritage — their sea-mother, their masks, their animal-masters, their languages carried forward and studied today, their colonial history of missions and residential schools and the 1953 High Arctic relocations and the sled-dog killings a matter for their own reckoning and their own entries, not for this one. And the Thule culture that replaced the Dorset has nothing whatever to do with the occult “Thule” of European legend, the Ultima Thule of the far north as symbol; the name-coincidence is only that. The Thule of the Arctic are the ancestors of the Inuit, a real people who really moved east; the other Thule is a story about a place at the edge of the map.

What remains of the Tuniit sits in two places at once. It sits in the ground and the museum drawer — the gouged holes and the ground slate, the bears diving down their own ribs, the faces on the Nunavik stone that the archaeologist William Fitzhugh’s Arctic Studies Center and others have spent careers trying to read. And it sits in the memory of the people who took the land from them and kept, for eight hundred years, the recollection of the strong shy giants who were there before. The land forgets nothing and says little; the Inuit remembered a people and a character but not a language; the bone, opened at last, told of a migration and an ending. Three witnesses to one vanished people, and for once they tell the same story.

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