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Archaeologist
Dennis Griffin examines the remains of a housepit from Thule-era
people who lived briefly on St. Matthew Island in about 1650.
(photo by Ned Rozell - Alaska Dispatch News)
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About 1,000 years ago, Norse explorer Leif Ericson bumped into
the New World at Newfoundland. The old world was filling up, with
300,000 people living in the Roman capital of Constantinople. At
the same time, up here in Alaska, the ancestors of today's coastal
Alaska Natives were quietly having one of the more successful runs
in human history.
The Thule people of Alaska's west and north coasts lived a good
life for centuries, perfecting technologies that traveled with them
across the northern Arctic all the way to Greenland. This April
is Alaska Archaeology Month, a time to think about people who mastered
life in the far north before anyone in the more populated world
knew about them.
How do you thrive so far from the equator and all its edible
plants and animals? The Thule hunted the largest animal to be found
up here: the bowhead whale.
Thule people invented the umiaq, a boat of sewn walrus hide.
Umiaqs allowed Thule people to intercept the slow-moving whales
and harpoon them. When a whale was struck and recovered, the hunters
had more than 30 tons of food. They also had building materials;
they framed their sod houses with whale bones along with driftwood.
Jeff Rasic has seen the sunken ovals of coastal tundra that
were Thule house pits, as well as the mounds enriched by bones and
other organic refuse left by those people near the present town
of Barrow.
"There's about 13 mounds littered with whalebones,"
said Rasic, an archaeologist with the National Park Service. "As
we were there mapping this site, people were there duck hunting.
People shot ducks and started plucking them right on the mounds."
That was a lightbulb moment for Rasic. People were attracted
to that place today just as they were many generations ago.
The Thule of A.D. 1000 developed many things Alaska Native elders
recognize today. Among the tools that stuck were the ulu, the knife
with the curved blade so effective at slicing blubber and fish;
kayaks, the pointed boats so stable in the ocean; snow goggles made
of bone cut with narrow slits; and advanced harpoon tips attached
to floats made of inflated sealskins (to find struck but submerged
whales). The Thule were also among the first people to use dogs
to help with travel and safety.
In the chill of the far north, Thule people have lived on in
what they have left behind.
"There are hundreds of Thule sites out there," Rasic
said. "Those in Greenland have great similarities to those
in Barrow and the Seward Peninsula."
After centuries of living well off the country, Thule people
experienced changes around 1850. Not only did a cold period known
as the Little Ice Age thicken sea ice and make the air-breathing
bowheads more elusive, but Thule people encountered Western explorers
and commercial whalers who permeated the far north.
The Thule communities waned after that contact, but today's
Inupiat descendants of Thule people trace some of their richest
traditions back to a culture that had things dialed in.
"They were wealthy, successful people," Rasic said
of the Thule. "Their adaptations worked really well. They were
just fine-tuning them for more than 1,000 years."
Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical
Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the
UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical
Institute.
Thule
culture
Thule culture, prehistoric culture that developed along the Arctic
coast in northern Alaska, possibly as far east as the Amundsen Gulf.
Starting about 900 ce, it spread eastward rapidly and reached Greenland
(Kalaallit Nunaat) by the 12th century. It continued to develop
in the central areas of Arctic Canada, and cultural communication
persisted between these Eastern Thule and the Western Thule of Alaska
from approximately 1300 to 1700.
http://www.britannica.com/topic/Thule-culture
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