Pre-Dorset/Arctic Small Tools Tradition 2000 - 800 B.C.

24.6.18

Brian Schwimmer, Virginia Petch, Linda Larcombe // After 1500 B.C., the climate began to cool, and vegetative patterns and animal habitat shifted south in response to this change. As the Native people of the Subarctic Shield Archaic followed suit, Pre-Dorset peoples occupied the abandon interior land. However, by 800 B.C., all evidence of them disappears.

The story of Arctic Small Tool tradition in Manitoba, represented by the Pre-Dorset occupation, is significant in that the sites represent the most southerly occupation of this culture. Giddings (1953) first identified it in northern Manitoba. The Thyazzi Site on the North Knife River was later tested by Nash in 1965 and assigned to an early to mid-Pre-Dorset occupation on the basis of the lithic assemblage (Nash 1969:48). Subsequent research of the coastal regions at Churchill, identified Arctic Small Tools Tradition at Twin Lakes and the Seahorse Gully Site on the Churchill West Peninsula.