Arctic Archaeology and Climate Change

An enduring debate in the field of Arctic archaeology has been the extent to which climate change impacted cultural developments in the past. Long-term culture change across the circumpolar Arctic was often highly dynamic, with episodes of rapid migration, regional abandonment, and—in some cases—the disappearance or wholesale replacement of entire cultural traditions. By the 1960s, researchers were exploring the possibility that warming episodes had positive effects on cold-adapted premodern peoples in the Arctic by ( a) reducing the extent of sea ice, ( b) expanding the size and range of marine mammal populations, and ( c) opening new waterways and hunting areas for marine-adapted human groups. Although monocausal climatic arguments for change are now regarded as overly simplistic, the growing threat of contemporary Arctic warming to Indigenous livelihoods has given wider relevance to research into long-term culture–climate interactions. With their capacity to examine deeper cultural responses to climate change, archaeologists are in a unique position to generate human-scale climate adaptation insights that may inform future planning and mitigation efforts. The exceptionally well-preserved cultural and paleo-ecological sequences of the Arctic make it one of the best-suited regions on Earth to address such problems. Ironically, while archaeologists employ an exciting and highly promising new generation of methods and approaches to examine long-term fragility and resilience in Arctic social-ecological systems, many of these frozen paleo-societal archives are fast disappearing due to anthropogenic warming.

The Tuvaaluk and Torngat archaeological projects: Review and assessment

In the late 1970s, two large, multi-disciplinary, multi-year archaeological programs were initiated along the coasts of northern Labrador and Ungava in northern Quebec. Both envisioned a new model for Arctic archaeology that integrated archaeology, ethnography, environmental studies, earth sciences, and informatics. The Tuvaaluk research program was directed by Patrick Plumet at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and the Torngat Archaeological Project (TAP) by William Fitzhugh at the Smithsonian Institution and Richard Jordan at Bryn Mawr College. Project periods lasted roughly five years and included researchers and students from several institutions. The Tuvaaluk project concentrated on Paleoeskimo and Thule cultures, while TAP included research on Maritime Archaic and later Indian cultures as well as Paleoeskimo and Inuit cultures. This paper reviews and compares Tuvaaluk and TAP goals, methods, results, lessons learned, and legacies.

The Thule-Inuit Succession in the Central Arctic

The development of Inuit culture out of an ancestral Thule culture base has been a central research question in Arctic archaeology for over a century. Archaeologists were intrigued by the fact that the Inuit lifeways of the ethnographic present, while highly variable, had seemingly developed from a relatively uniform Thule cultural base. However, the past few decades have seen relatively little research directed toward this important issue. This chapter explores the history of research into the origins of Central Arctic Inuit cultures, as well as some of the explanations that have been advanced. It ends by suggesting that Resilience Theory may be a useful theoretical approach for framing the Thule-Inuit transformation in this region.

The Timing of the Thule Migration: New Dates from the Western Canadian Arctic

The Thule migration from Alaska to the eastern North American Arctic is central to the understanding of Inuit history. However, despite decades of study, its timing remains controversial, with recent reappraisals suggesting that it may have occurred much later than the date of A.D. 1000 most often assumed for it. In this paper, we present newly obtained radiocarbon dates from two early Thule sites, Nelson River (OhRh-1) and Washout (NjVi-2), located on the Beaufort Sea and Amundsen Gulf coasts. This region is crucial to any understanding of the migration, because Thule Inuit would have had to pass through it in order to reach the eastern Arctic. Nelson River in particular has long been considered a good candidate for the earliest Thule site east of Alaska, based on a number of lines of evidence including the presence of both Natchuk and Sicco harpoon heads. In this paper, we present new dates for Nelson River and Washout that demonstrate that neither site was occupied before the thirteenth century A.D. The new dates have profound implications for Arctic archaeology, because they strengthen the case for a thirteenth-century migration, and by doing so demonstrate that it was more rapid and widespread than has generally been believed. The dates also suggest that the "Classic" Thule period is a relatively brief phenomenon, lasting perhaps only 200 years or less, before being rapidly reorganized into the diversity of Inuit societies encountered in later Arctic history.