Robert W. Park

The Dorset-Thule succession in Arctic North America: assessing claims for culture contact

Most Arctic archaeologists believe that the people of the Thule culture, who arrived in the eastern Arctic approximately 1,000 years ago, met people of the Dorset culture and acquired important knowledge from them while replacing them in this region. The most convincing indication for technology transfer comes from the Thule adoption of Dorset harpoon-head styles. However, a review of radiocarbon dates, artifact styles, and site data reveals no conclusive evidence for face-to-face contact between the people of these two cultures. Given evidence that the Thule actively salvaged harpoon heads and carvings from abandoned Dorset sites, I contend that salvage was the sole means of contact between these cultures and the means by which harpoon-head technology was transferred. This example points out the importance of salvage as a mode of culture contact and the weakness of studies that interpret changes in material culture solely in a culture-historical context.

Size counts : the miniature archaeology of childhood in Inuit societies

The role and place of children is frequently overlooked in archaeology. Here Robert Park presents an intriguing analysis of the toys of childhood found in Inuit societies in Canada and Greenland, and assesses how such objects inform on the role of children in Arctic societies.

Thule winter site demography in the high Arctic

The people of the Thule culture, who entered the Canadian Arctic approximately 1,000 years ago and eventually became the Inuit who today inhabit that region, spent the long winters living in impressive semisubterranean houses constructed of boulders, skins, pieces of cut turf, and the bones of bowhead whales. Most sites contain fewer than 10 houses, but some contain many more, leading to disagreement among archaeologists concerning Thule settlement patterns. This paper reviews the criteria archaeologists have used to identify contemporaneous houses at large Thule sites and identifies a new criterion tested at a site in the High Arctic. The 14 houses at the Porden Point site appear to have accumulated gradually through the abandonment of some houses and the construction of others. Therefore, the impressive appearance today of many Thule sites may not reflect their actual social/demographic nature.

Characterization of chert artifacts and two newly identified chert quarries on Southern Baffin Island

Abstract Inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) trace element analysis was used to characterize raw chert from one secondary (LeDx-42) and two primary (LbDt-1 and LdDx-2) sources on southern Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. Raw chert trace element data are compared to ICP-MS trace element data for chert artifacts from a nearby Palaeo-Eskimo archaeological site (LeDx-42). Geochemical consistencies identified among the analyzed samples support the inference that Palaeo-Eskimo toolmakers at LeDx-42 exploited LdDx-2 and LbDt-1 as chert source locations.

Contact between the Norse Vikings and the Dorset culture in Arctic Canada

Instances of cultural interaction between Norse and native American have long been accepted. But current archaeological research recognises that the indigenous peoples of the north were themselves diverse and had diverse histories. Here the author shows that the culture of one of them, the Dorset people, owed nothing to the Norse and probably had no contact with them.

A human-centered GIS approach to modeling mobility on southern Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada

Southern Baffin Island has been occupied for several millennia, but its enormous size, coupled with scarcity of identified inland archaeological sites that can be confidently linked to coastal occupations, makes modeling ancient seasonal mobility across the region through traditional cost-surface least-cost pathway approaches impractical. We present a method that combines weighted multi-criteria cost surface analysis with a watershed function to create a “mobility-shed” of non-winter travel pathways covering the study area. We evaluate the predictive utility of the resulting pathways for future archaeological survey by assessing their spatial relationships to known archaeological sites. The results of this comparison suggest that elevation and land cover criteria should be augmented with ethnographic and resource availability data to model mobility in this region.

Stories of Arctic colonization

Genetic data elucidate the population history of the North American Arctic [Also see Research Article by Raghavan et al.] In the winter of 1902 to 1903, the last original inhabitants of two islands at the north end of Canadas Hudson Bay perished from a disease introduced by whalers. Called Sadlermiut by the Aivilingmiut Inuit who occupied the adjacent mainland coast, they appear to have actively avoided interaction with any people outside their own society. According to the Aivilingmiut, the Sadlermiut had spoken a strange dialect; were bad at vital Inuit skills such as making skin clothing, constructing igloos, and tending oil lamps; were uncleanly; and did not observe standard Inuit taboos. They also made sharp stone tools by flaking chert, whereas all other Inuit groups in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland made sharp stone tools mainly by grinding slate (1). Who were these mysterious people (2, 3)? On page 1020 of this issue, Raghavan et al. (4) report genetic data that shed light on this and other questions about the population history of the North American Arctic.

Manual Point Cloud Classification and Extraction for Hunter-Gatherer Feature Investigation: A Test Case From Two Low Arctic Paleo-Inuit Sites

Abstract For archaeologists, the task of processing large terrestrial laser scanning (TLS)-derived point cloud data can be difficult, particularly when focusing on acquiring analytical and interpretive outcomes from the data. Using our TLS lidar data collected in 2013 from two compositionally different, low Arctic multi-component hunter-gatherer sites (LdFa-1 and LeDx-42), we demonstrate how a manual point cloud classification approach with open source software can be used to extract natural and archaeological features from a site’s surface. Through a combination of spectral datasets typical to TLS (i.e., intensity and RGB values), archaeologists can enhance the visual and analytical representation of archaeological huntergatherer site surfaces. Our approach classifies low visibility Arctic site point clouds into independent segments, each representing a different surface material found on the site. With the segmented dataset, we extract only the surface boulders to create an alternate characterization of the site’s prominent features and their surroundings. Using surface point clouds from Paleo-Inuit sites allows us to demonstrate the value of this approach within hunter-gatherer research as our results illustrate an effective use of large TLS datasets for extracting and improving our analytical capabilities for low relief site features.

Frozen Coasts and the Development of Inuit Culture in the North American Arctic

The northernmost part of the North American continent has seen some of the most fascinating human adaptations anywhere. In the New World this huge area extends some 11,000 km from the Aleutian Islands in the west to Greenland and Labrador in the east (Fig. 25.1). Geographically and in terms of human occupations, the Arctic is perhaps best defined as the area beyond the tree line (the northern limit of continuous forest). Some other attributes that help define the Arctic include persistence of cold (long winters and short cool summers), a largely treeless environment, permafrost (year-round frozen ground), large seasonal differences in the amount of sunlight, and very few plant foods that are consumable by humans. At the time of initial European contact a majority of human groups inhabiting the North American Arctic spent at least a part of the year living near the coast and making use of both land mammals on the tundra and sea mammals in the open ocean during the summer. However, in the winter the landscape changes dramatically.

Faces from the Franklin expedition? Craniofacial reconstructions of two members of the 1845 northwest passage expedition

In 2013, partial skeletal remains from three members of the 1845 John Franklin expedition were recovered from an archaeological site at Erebus Bay, King William Island, Nunavut. The remains included three crania, two of which were sufficiently intact to allow craniofacial reconstructions. Identifications are not proposed for either reconstruction; however, tentative identifications are being explored through DNA analyses currently underway that include samples obtained from both crania.