Studying Arctic Drums

Chris Wolff, Lori, and I spent the last couple of days viewing and documenting Arctic drums and drum parts in the Canadian Museum of History's archaeological and ethnographic collections in Gatineau.  We were primarily interested in the Late Dorset drums from Button Point on Bylot Island.  We thought there was one more-or-less complete drum and a second partial drum, but it turned out there was a lot more to the collection than that.   Both drum frames are actually complete and there were fragments of more than a half dozen other drums from the same site.  Its a much larger sample than we were expecting and the details of the drum construction and decoration are more apparent than we were hoping for.

To put the archaeologically collected drums into context, we also viewed the ethnographic Inuit drums in the Museum's collection.  They are in the same family of drum, but their construction and design differed in several key aspects.  Chris and I plan to prepare a publication on what we found.  It was a fantastic trip and I'll share a few more photos soon.  The collections staff at the CMH were tremendously helpful and accommodating in all our requests.

Photo Credits: Lori White and Tim Rast