The Birnirk/Thule Migrations: Pushed from an Overpopulated Bering Strait Dominated by Old Bering Sea Culture

Summary

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

A climate-driven eastward push of Thule migrants remains axiomatic to many arctic archaeologists, associated with presumed warming weather of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), by tradition dated ca. AD 1000. Thule researchers implicated a rapid migration by rapacious “over-killing” seal-hunters and whalers entering unoccupied landscapes—increasingly insupportable on ecological grounds, confounded by contemporaneous Dorset communities ca. AD 1300. New data from regional paleoclimatic proxies (beach ridges and glacial varves) indicate a cooler MCA. The western arctic Thule data include deep middens and hundreds of burials; some include offerings conveying the factors for emigration: status differentiation and social inequality. Locally, overpopulation can be inferred from cemeteries near Utqiagvik (Barrow) and Pt. Hope. A Thule iron trade with the Norse or Dorset cannot be substantiated as a pull factor since Greenlandic metal is absent west of Canada and ivory carving declined. Recalibrating the extensive radiocarbon chronology (>150) places the eastward Thule migration during a cool thirteenth century within a political landscape indicating that ancestral Thule societies, Birnirk or Punuk, arose within a Bering Strait still dominated by Old Bering Sea societies. Five discrete migrations of Birnirk, Punuk, or Thule groups occurred from Bering Strait, including the inland Arctic Woodland and Brooks Range movements.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32501