This dissertation examines the various artistic carvings produced by the hunter-gatherer Dorset people who occupied the eastern Arctic and temperate regions of Canada and Greenland between circa BC 800 – AD 1300. It includes considerations on how the carved objects affected and played a role in Dorset social life. To consider the role of people, things and other beings that may be said to play as actors in interdependent entanglements of actions, the agency/actornetwork theory is employed. From this theoretical review an interpretation of social life as created by the ways people interact with the material world is presented. This framework is employed as a lens into the social role and meaning the carvings played in the Dorset society. The examined assemblages were recovered from a series of Dorset settlement sites,
mainly in house, midden, and burial contexts, providing a substantive case study through which variations and themes of carvings are studied. Over 1000 Dorset carvings are systematically interpreted and presented to identify various details and patterning including types, forms, subject matter, and raw material selection, as well as temporal and spatial distribution. These carvings are represented in miniaturized portable portrayals depicting animal, human, and tool implements, along with utilitarian object pieces elaborated with incised ornamentation, including petroglyphs with various depictions of human-like face engravings. The images portrayed exhibit representations of different individual beings/agents that shared the same environment and formed the daily basis of economic and social frameworks including material products that were integral to the human condition. The carvings are depicted in realistic forms of expression both in attitude and movement. They exhibit different behavioral situations and subject matter suggesting carvings operated as material symbols that played a role in communicating aspects of Dorset ideology. This research suggests that a clear change occurred in the subject matter chosen to depict in the carvings throughout the Dorset culture temporally divided into Early, Middle, and Late Dorset periods. The general progress of subject choice shows that during the Early Dorset period, miniaturized tool carvings had a more important role in depictions, whereas during the Middle Dorset period general emphasis on the animal subject are dominantly exhibited and during the Late Dorset period the human subject becomes highly important to display. The changes in the focus of the subject matter seem to suggest that ideological and social engagements and practices important to Dorset people shifted through time. The systematically collected data of the carvings are integrated with analogies based on observations of other cultures from across the circumpolar region to assist with parallel perspectives. The different forms of artistic carvings reflect dynamic daily activities among agents. The analyses of which suggest that socially constructed practices are culturally transmitted among the Dorset people over the course of time. The various portrayals of animal and human depictions along with ornamented utilitarian tools and miniature implements reflect an ontology that focused on relational manner where human, object, and animal worlds existed as reciprocal entities exerting influence in Dorset social life and ideology.