Radiocarbon Evidence for Fourteenth-Century Dorset Occupation in the Eastern North American Arctic

Abstract

One of the most persistent debates in the archaeology of the North American Arctic relates to thirteenth-century AD population distributions and movements. Around this time, the final culture of the long-lived Paleo-Inuit tradition, known as Late Dorset, was replaced by Thule Inuit, who migrated from Alaska to the Eastern Arctic. Due to the almost complete lack of evidence for direct interaction between Dorset and Thule, there are currently two contrasting models for this transitional period. The first proposes a temporal hiatus between Late Dorset and Thule during which the Eastern Arctic was unoccupied. The second proposes that Late Dorset persisted to at least the late thirteenth century and still occupied some regions of the Eastern Arctic when Thule arrived. Resolution of this question depends largely on radiocarbon dates, particularly for the poorly understood Late Dorset period. This article presents 56 new AMS radiocarbon dates from three Late Dorset sites in the Iqaluktuuq region of southeastern Victoria Island in the Central Arctic. They resolve a significant part of the debate by confirming that Dorset settlement continued in this region later than AD 1300, thus overlapping with Thule settlement in adjacent regions for decades, and perhaps as much as a century.