This volume describes the activities of the Archaeological Survey of Canada, National Museum of Man, for the years 1980 and 1981. / Un rapport sur les activités du Commission archéologique du Canada, Musée national de l’Homme pendant les années 1980 à 1981.
In 1974, the Salvage Section, Archaeological Survey of Canada, National Museum of Man, instituted nine archaeological salvage projects across the country. These ranged from a brief survey of one portion of the Mackenzie Highway to the extensive survey and excavations on the Suffield Military Reserve in southeastern Alberta. This volume contains summary articles describing these projects.
Over 1,400 individual skeletons from three major skeletal populations were examined for a series of approximately fifty infracranial non-metric traits. Trait frequencies are studied for size, sex and age differences, trait intercorrelations, and association with bone robusticity. Skeletal population studies are performed using various combinations of the traits and two distance statistics.
The results of investigations of copper technology and sources of copper of the prehistoric inhabitants of the North American Arctic and Subarctic are described. A total of 342 artifacts were examined from Arctic Small Tool tradition, Thule, Historic Eskimo, Chipewyan, Kutchin, and Ahtna contexts. Part 1 contains an analysis of copper composition, primarily by the neutron activation method, and a description of prehistoric manufacturing techniques. Part II is an annotated bibliography of metal occurrences in the north.
These two master’s theses represent the first detailed reports on historic Neutral village sites. An analysis of the Walker site, a large ten acre, nonpalisaded Neutral Iroquois town occupied circa 1640 A.D. The site provides a comparative baseline for the study of the Neutral Iroquois and demonstrates trends and relationships extant during the late part of the Neutral sequence. Analysis indicates Neutral Iroquois occupancy of the six acre Hamilton site from circa 1638 to 1650 A.D., but the presence of a high percentage of foreign pottery raises a number of interpretational hypothesis to account for it.
Excavations at the Lagoon site (OjRl-3) on the southern coast of Banks Island, Northwest Territories have provided a database with which to formulate hypotheses concerning the Paleoeskimo culture history of the western periphery of the Canadian Arctic at ca. 500 B.C.