Thule culture

The Thule culture, sometimes called proto-Inuit, is the archaeological name for the whale-hunting ancestors of all of today's Inuit and Yupik peoples. Taking shape on the coasts of Alaska by about 1000 CE, Thule groups spread east across Arctic Canada within a few centuries and reached Greenland by the 1200s, replacing the older Dorset culture along the way. The name comes from the Thule district of north-west Greenland, where their remains were first identified.

Archaeologists see the Thule as the end point of a long maritime tradition around the Bering Strait, sometimes dated from about 200 BCE. Its earlier stages are known as Old Bering Sea (with the closely related Okvik), Punuk and Birnirk. Old Bering Sea sites show the first kayaks and umiaks, large open skin boats, along with polished slate blades and ivory harpoon heads decorated with dots, circles and short lines. In the Punuk stage, from about 800 CE, whaling became more important, settlements grew larger and bows, bone armour and bird bolas appeared. Birnirk people of northern Alaska made sledges much like later dog sleds. A 2014 genetic study traced the Thule directly to Birnirk populations, whose roots lay in north-eastern Siberia.

From around the start of the second millennium, Thule families moved east along the Beaufort Sea coast, into the High Arctic islands and down the western shore of Hudson Bay. Why they went is debated. One model, proposed by the archaeologist R. McGhee, links the move to a warm period between roughly 900 and 1200, when longer open-water seasons let bowhead whales range further east, with hunters following. Others point to conflict in Alaska or a search for iron. Dog sleds, kayaks and umiaks let them travel and carry loads over great distances. The Danish archaeologist Therkel Mathiassen, who worked on the Fifth Thule Expedition of 1921–1924, was the first to map this migration from Alaska.

Between about 1100 and 1400, the period archaeologists call Classic Thule, bowhead whaling sustained some of the largest settlements of the prehistoric Arctic: fifteen to twenty houses at good whaling sites, and at least one site with sixty. Winter homes were dug partly into the ground, roofed with skins and sod over frames of whale bone; in summer people lived in tents held down by rings of stone. A single whale supplied meat, oil for light and cooking, and building material, and the catch was shared through the community. Hunts were led by a boat captain, the umialik, a role still respected in northern Alaska. Differences between houses suggest that some families were wealthier than others. The Thule used iron long before European contact, from meteorites such as the Cape York meteorite and through trade with the Norse in Greenland, and copper circulated from the western Arctic.

Thule people and the Norse, who reached North America in the eleventh century during the Viking Age, were in contact; Norse sources call the peoples they met Skrælingjar. Genetic studies found no mixing between the two populations in Greenland, despite centuries of living on the same island.

The onset of the colder Little Ice Age, from about 1400, shortened the open-water season and reduced whale numbers. By 1600 umiak and kayak whaling had stopped in the High Arctic and people had left much of it, turning more to caribou, seals and fish. In this period regional groups such as the Copper Inuit, the Netsilik and the Inuit of the Igloolik area emerged, the direct forebears of modern Inuit communities.

Our maps draw an approximate Thule range from 800 to 1500, spreading east over the area held earlier by the Dorset culture. In Alaska the later maps show their descendants as the Iñupiat and Yupik peoples.