Graham Westbrook Rowley

Graham Westbrook Rowley

Graham Westbrook Rowley, CM, MBE, MA (Cantab) explorer, archaeologist, public servant, (b at Manchester, Eng 31 Oct 1912; d at Ottawa, 31 Dec 2003). As a young archaeologist he went to the Eastern Arctic with the British Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1936. In the winter of 1937, he drove a dog team from Repulse Bay to Igloolik and then, travelling with Inuit, completed the map of the Baffin Island coastline. His excavation in 1939 of a pure Dorset Inuit site established the DORSET CULTURE without a doubt as distinct from the THULE CULTURE. Rowley Island in Foxe Basin and the Rowley River on Baffin Island are named after him.

Throughout WWII he served in the Canadian Army. He returned to Canada to command the advance party of Exercise Musk Ox, establishing an airfield on the ice at Baker Lake. He retired as a lieutenant colonel and was appointed secretary and coordinator of the Advisory Committee on Northern Development and later scientific adviser to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (now INDIAN AND NORTHERN AFFAIRS CANADA). He then joined Carleton University's Institute of Canadian Studies as a research professor. His encyclopedic knowledge of and enthusiasm for the arctic have earned him the respect and affection of several generations of students, arctic specialists and Inuit. His account of his exploratory journeys and excavations in northern Canada have been published as Cold Comfort (1996) and he co-authored The Circumpolar North (1978).