Pre-Dorset and Dorset Artifacts: The View from Lake Harbour

Abstract

Throughout the geographic and temporal range of dorset there is little yet documented to indicate major cultural changes. The Pre-Dorset part of the Paleoeskimo continuum is better known by its lithic artifacts, and to date too few sites have produced non-lithic ones to afford a clear picture of technological development. On the other hand, there is enough available information on the two periods to indicate that some non-lithic artifacts reflect a regularity in the shifting styles of discrete attributes over those thirty-five hundred years involved. Such minor style shifts do not readily appear functional in the sense of producing a more efficiently adaptive weapon, and some seem to entail more manufacturing energy coupled to greater risk of breakage without apparent gain in efficiency. Regardless of the reasons for these changes in style, they appear to occur simultaneously over relatively broad areas and appear to indicate an intensity of information exchange and cultural conformity within such areas. This is most notable within what has been called the core area (see Introduction): a region including North Baffin and Bylot Islands, the Fury and Hecla Straits, Southampton, Coats, and Mansel Islands, both shores of Hudson Strait, and southern Baffin Island at least as far north as Cumberland Sound. As McGhee (this volume) has suggested, there are periods in which this stylistic homogeneity extended into the High Arctic, and different periods in which the Central Arctic as far west as Victoria Island (but not the High Arctic) participated in many of these discrete style shifts.