Dorset culture

The Dorset were a Paleo-Eskimo culture of the North American Arctic, lasting from about 500 BCE until somewhere between 1000 and 1500 CE, between the earlier Pre-Dorset and the incoming Thule. Named for Cape Dorset, now Kinngait, where western science first found them, they hunted seal, walrus and caribou without bows, dogsleds or kayaks, using distinctive triangular end-blades, soapstone oil lamps and burins. Four technological phases trace two millennia of cold-country mastery from Alaska to Greenland. The Thule migrating east from the 11th century spread through Dorset lands, and by 1500 the Dorset were gone, with genetics showing virtually no mixing between the two peoples. Inuit remember them as the Tuniit, a strong, shy, giant folk of legend. Their longhouses, middens and otherworldly carvings of bears and spirit faces remain the Arctic's deepest portrait of life before the Inuit world, and new faces still surface from the Cape Dorset middens studied since 1925.