Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Archaeology: Thule Tradition and Climate Change

Archaeology
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Thule Tradition and Climate Change
Nov 2nd 2011, 10:08

An interesting article in the journal Geoarchaeology lends some evidence of the Thule tradition adapting to climate change, particularly global warming, on the Hudson Bay area in Canada.

Map of the location of Qijurittuq Site on Hudson Bay

The Thule tradition is the name archaeologists have given to the immediate ancestors of the Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic, between about AD 1 and 1600. They were hunters of walrus, seals and whales, and as you might expect, they (and their descendants) have an earned reputation for skill with bone and ivory sculpting.

The Thule folks lived in ice and snow houses (igloos) during the summer, when their lifestyles were nomadic, and in the winters, they built semi-subterranean pit houses constructed of sod and whale bone. In an article in Geoarchaeology, Anne-Marie Lemieux and her colleagues write about the site of Qijurittuq, where, during a brief warming spell between AD 970 and AD 1160, a Thule group built the more-or-less permanent village of Qijurittuq on an island near the coast of Hudson Bay.

Lemieux A-M, Bhiry N, and Desrosiers PM. 2011. The geoarchaeology and traditional knowledge of winter sod houses in eastern Hudson Bay, Canadian Low Arctic. Geoarchaeology 26(4):479-500.

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