Post by UKarchaeology on Apr 3, 2016 19:58:38 GMT
Archaeologist Dennis Griffin examines the remains of a housepit from Thule-era people who lived briefly on St. Matthew Island in about 1650. Ned Rozell
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.
Full story: www.adn.com/article/20160402/ancestors-inupiat-were-technological-pioneers