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## The Erebus Bay Site in Archaeological Context
The site designated NgLj-2 in the Nunavut archaeological registry is not a remote or obscure location. It is at Erebus Bay, on the southeastern coast of King William Island — a location that expedition survivors would have reached after crossing the island from the abandoned ships and that is consistent with the general route toward the Back River described in the Victory Point note.
The site was first described to European investigators through the Inuit accounts gathered by Charles Francis Hall during his 1869 expedition. Hall spent years in the Canadian Arctic, living with Inuit communities and collecting oral traditions about the Franklin expedition. The accounts he received described a location where a boat had been found, where human remains had been seen, and where the evidence of what had happened was visible to those who had been there. Hall located and visited the site himself.
The site was not formally excavated by scientific archaeologists until Anne Keenleyside’s work in 1993. Keenleyside’s expedition located the site and conducted a systematic surface and subsurface survey, recovering 451 bones from an area encompassing several hundred square meters. The bones were heavily fragmented and disarticulated — not in anatomical position but scattered, as they would be after animal activity, freeze-thaw cycling over more than 140 years, and the processes of decomposition.
The 1993 excavation and Keenleyside’s subsequent analysis — published in a detailed 1997 paper — constitutes the foundational scientific documentation of the site. The cut-mark analysis was central to the paper’s conclusions: marks in locations and of characters consistent with defleshing, disarticulation, and marrow extraction — the specific set of modifications that would result from the systematic processing of human remains for food — were documented on a substantial proportion of the 451 bones.