S. Brooke Milne

Palaeo-Eskimo Novice Flintknapping in the Eastern Canadian Arctic

Abstract Data from two inland Palaeo-Eskimo sites on southern Baffin Island are evidence for novice flintknapping. The interior of the island boasts a rich and reliable supply of lithic raw material, and the two sites were occupied during the Artic warm season when access to it was unrestricted. The use of a direct procurement strategy to acquire the material at this time of year from such a localized source suggests that acquisition activities were structured as part of the seasonal resource exploitation strategies of the Palaeo-Eskimos on southern Baffin Island. The incidence of novice flintknapping appears to be directly linked to this procurement. By drawing on data from published replicative studies and archaeological remains, socially meaningful patterns of idiosyncratic assemblage variability can be identified, providing greater insights into the social components of lithic tool production and skill apprenticeship.

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.

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.