KIMMIRUT - An archeologist from the Canadian Museum of Civilization was in Kimmirut in September, studying ancient sites and sharing what she has learned with the people who inherited the land.

Michael has worked on archeological digs near Kimmirut for five seasons. His mother was involved in earlier digs in the area in the 1970s. - photo courtesy of Patricia Sutherland

Patricia Sutherland, the museum's curator of Arctic archeology, has been in and out of Kimmirut for years, following up on local discoveries which have interested researchers since the 1960s.

"People seem to be very excited about what's going on and the results so far," she said. "I try to take information back to the community.

"The community is involved in terms of kids working with me on the excavation. They assist with logistics; we take at least one elder with us out to the site in the summer."

Seemeega Aqpik, manager of the Mayukalik Hunters and Trappers Organization, said Sutherland found a half of a whetstone nearby in 2001, of a type used by Norse people. Upon returning to the Canadian Museum of Civilization she found it was the other half of a piece dug up in the 1960s. The whetstone was embedded with fragments of iron, silver and gold, clearly not the product of either Inuit or Dorset cultures.

"She's finding out that the Vikings and the Tuniit were trading," said Aqpik. "Artifacts they found are starting to tell a story."

Archeologists call the ancestors of Inuit the Thule culture, because the first artifacts left behind by those people were found at Thule, now called Qaanaaq, Greenland.

Sutherland said modern scholars believe the Dorset people, who lived in the Canadian Arctic before the Thule came from what is now Alaska, are the same as the Tuniit people Inuit tell stories about.

Tommy Akavak of Kimmirut said he had heard of the Tuniit, the people from outside, from local elders. He said they were muscular hunters of bowhead whales.

"I think it's very good," he said of the research. "It's important to know our past history."

All that remains of the Dorset are fish weirs, tent rings and drying racks unlike those used by Inuit. Scholars think the Dorset all but disappeared around 1200-1300 AD, Sutherland said. What happened to them isn't clear, nor what kinds of interactions there were between Inuit and Dorset.

"It's a burning question which has been going for many decades," said Sutherland.

Sutherland has also spent time exploring contact between Dorset, Inuit and the Norse. The Norse, popularly known as Vikings, settled and traded in North America centuries before the continent was "discovered" by Christopher Columbus.

She said she'd like to get the Cape Tanfield site designated as a National Historic Site, since some of its artifacts suggest human occupation going back 4,000 years.

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