Patricia Sutherland

Patricia D. Sutherland is a Canadian archaeologist, specialising in the Arctic. She is an adjunct professor at Carleton University, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, and sole proprietor of Northlands Research. Much of her recent research has focused on evidence of a lengthy Norse presence on Baffin Island in the 11th to 13th centuries CE and trade between them and the now-extinct Dorset people of the region. Sutherland's theory that there were Europeans on Baffin Island hundreds of years before the Norse settled Greenland at the start of the 11th century is controversial.

Education and career Sutherland holds a PhD from the University of Alberta. She is an Adjunct Research Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen

Until April 2012, she was also employed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, now the Canadian Museum of History, most recently as curator of Arctic archaeology. She was the only female archaeologist working there. It has been speculated, including by the CBC programme The Fifth Estate, that she was let go because her research no longer fit with the changed focus of the museum on Canadian history, and some have suggested that the political motivation extends to a fear that her research will undermine Canadian sovereignty claims in the high Arctic. Other speculation points to her having been one of six staff of the museum who wrote a letter objecting on moral grounds to its acquisition of a collection of artefacts taken from the wreck of . When Sutherland was fired, her access to her research materials was cut off and many were dispersed. This and evidence of metalworking–bronze and smelted iron, in addition to whetstones used for sharpening metal implements–and tally sticks like those used by the Norse, found at four sites where Dorset people had camped as much as 1,000 miles (1,600 km) apart between northern Baffin Island and northern Labrador, suggested both long-term trading contact between the Norse and the Dorset, and a long-term presence of Norsemen in the region. She presented her view at an exhibition titled Full Circle: First Contact, Vikings and Skraelings in Newfoundland and Labrador, which opened at the Provincial Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador in summer 2000, and at a meeting of the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology in St. John's in October 2012. The radiocarbon dates of items at the Nanook site include some predating the Norse by several hundred years. Elizabeth Wayland Barber of Occidental College, archaeologist and expert on textiles, writing about the Lascaux caves in France, "We now have at least two pieces of evidence that this important principle of twisting for strength dates to the Palaeolithic.

The international Helluland Project, organised by Sutherland, was to have published a book on her findings; this has been suspended as a result of her loss of access to her materials.

Selected publications (ed.) The Franklin Era in Canadian Arctic History, 1845–1859. Symposium report. Archaeological Survey of Canada paper 131. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1985. . "The Variety of Artistic Expression in Dorset Culture". in: Fifty Years of Arctic Research: Anthropological Studies from Greenland to Siberia. Ed. R. Gilberg and H.C. Gulløv. Nationalmuseets skrifter, Etnografisk række 18. Copenhagen: Department of Ethnography, National Museum of Denmark, 1997. . pp. 287–93. Contributions to the Study of the Dorset-Palaeo Eskimos. Archaeology paper 167. Gatineau, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2005. . The Ties that Bind: Fur-Fibre Cordage and Associated Material from Dorset Palaeo-Eskimo Sites in Eastern Canada. Penelope Walton Rogers and Philip Greaves. 2018. Sutherland, P.D. (2009). The question of contact between Dorset Palaeo-Eskimos and early Europeans in the Eastern Arctic. In H. Maschner, O. Mason, & R. McGhee (Eds.), Thenorthern world AD 900–1400: The dynamics of climate, economy, and politics in hemispheric perspective (pp. 279–299). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Evidence of Early Metalworking in Arctic Canada. Patricia D. Sutherland, Peter H. Thompson, and Patricia A. Hunt. 2015.