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The Dartmouth
March 29, 2024 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Arctic explorer; Symposium honors prof's 80th birthday

Retired Anthropology Professor Elmer Harp, a pioneer in the development of archaeological research in the Eastern Arctic, was honored on campus last week at an event which drew anthropology experts from around the world.

The three-day event, dubbed The Elders Conference on the History of Archeology in the Eastern Arctic, was sponsored by the Dicky Endowment, the Institute on Canada and the United States, the Institute of Arctic Studies, the anthropology and Native American studies departments and The Arctic Studies Center of the Smithsonian.

The celebration was the brainchild of William Fitzhugh '64, one of Harp's former students, and attracted the "elders" of the field, experts from around the world.

Harp noted that this event was not held entirely for him, yet his assessment falls into line with his modest account of his accomplishments, many of which have had significant impact on the academic departments at Dartmouth.

Harp, who celebrated his 80th birthday in April, founded the anthropology department at the College in the 1960s.

His 32 years of field research in Newfoundland resulted in the naming of the site of his research near the city of Port au Choix as a historical landmark. Harp has travelled around the world, living a year in Denmark as a senior research fellow under the Fulbright program, and serving on a PT boat during World War II.

He was an undergraduate at Harvard when he first travelled to the Yukon, touching off the beginning of his research there. During the next 30 years he led 11 expeditions to Port au Choix, or the Port of Chance, the home of the Dorset Eskimos.

"I decided to concentrate on the history of the pre-arctic Yukon territory and the ancestral Eskimo eastward movement," he said. "Port Au Choix in Newfoundland is rich in Eskimo sights, and over the years, I took a lot of [Dartmouth] students there."

Harp's research has produced volumes of notes which have aided other field researchers in their studies, and his excavations of two dozen Eskimo living sites have provided the frame work of the most southern-found Eskimo culture which existed from 100 B.C. to 1000 A.D.

"It is a fascinating story to see how people evolved around the Bering Strait. [The Dorset Eskimos] were originally from Siberia," he explained. "The cultural adaptation requires very specialized skills to survive. They didn't know that there was any outside world."

Harp came to Hanover in 1947 as curator of anthropology at what was then the College Museum. Many of the artifacts he had found were put on display at the museum, and he frequently taught classes for the sociology department.

"For several years the sociology department would bring sections of Socy 1 over to the museum and I would give them a brief summary of prehistoric studies," he said.

Many of the artifacts in the museum at that time were ones that Harp found himself. The Dorset "are a remarkable part of human history. Every time I went North, I collected something," he said.

As interest in cultural studies grew at the College, Harp said he developed his own courses for the sociology department.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Harp went back to Harvard, at Dartmouth's request, for a two-year intensive study of Russian culture. "The College wanted to develop a larger Russian program, so they asked me to go to Harvard and learn everything -- language, culture, economics," he said. "For two years I took every course they had to offer."

Upon returning to the College in the early 1950s, Harp helped format courses in several departments. But after 10 years, he decided to focus on anthropology, and "peeled away from the sociology department and created an anthropology department in the museum."

Harp and Robert McKennen, who was then a professor at the College, developed courses and a major in the department. "I was made director and developed it into a very fine teaching museum," he said.

Harp still returns to give lectures. "I have loads of slides," he said. "And stories, " added his wife Elaine.

When asked when he and his wife, will return to the site at Port au Choix, Harp said, "I haven't been in a while, but I would love to go again. It is a most beautiful place. It hasn't changed a bit."