The Birnirk to Thule Transition as Viewed from Two Adjacent Houses at Cape Espenberg

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The transformation of the Birnirk culture into the Thule culture remains central to the development of modern Inuit peoples across the Arctic. Nevertheless, its chronological definition remains imprecise and contentious despite a century of research since the discovery of the Birnirk site near Utqiagvik and the definition of the Thule culture in the central Canadian Arctic. Despite 30 years of efforts to increase radiocarbon dating, refined chronologies established by AMS radiocarbon dates from samples within well-defined contexts have been insufficient to precisely date the cultural components preceding Thule Inuit and the emergence and expansion of early Thule. In this paper, we examine the Birnirk-Thule transition through the radiocarbon, tree-ring dating, and Bayesian chronological modeling from two dwellings only 25 m apart on the Cape Espenberg Rising Whale site (KTZ-304) at the entrance of Kotzebue Sound in northwestern Alaska. A series of 50 radiocarbon and 15 tree-ring dates indicate the two houses—respectively containing a Late Birnirk and an early Thule component—were not contemporaneous and that each was likely occupied for around one to two human generations. Our analysis places the Birnirk to Thule transition in the mid-thirteenth century AD.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32560