Early Thule Inuit Architecture in the Arctic: An Anchor in Migration and Movement

Summary

This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During and for a few hundred years after the Thule Inuit migration around AD 1200, early Thule groups in the North American Arctic established village sites in new locations where they maintained a similarity in ceremonial architecture, house form, and division of space, despite the variability of resources and vast distances between them. This form changed in many areas after the early Thule period, demonstrating that people did adapt their built environment to new regions, but chose to maintain the original house form for a while. This paper highlights the similarity in form across the Arctic using domestic and ceremonial plans from Alaska to Greenland. I also examine the use of space using faunal data from two houses, one from Alaska, near the start of the migration, and one from the central Canadian Arctic, near the middle of the migration. Despite differences in resources, faunal spatial patterning shows broad similarities across both houses, indicating that people used the house spaces in similar ways. This paper argues that people maintained ceremonial structures, dwelling form, and use of space during the early Thule Inuit period as an anchor to a broader culture in a period of major movement and change.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25686