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Thule Winter Site Demography in the High Arctic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Robert W. Park
Robert W. Park*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1 Canada
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Abstract

The people of the Thule culture, who entered the Canadian Arctic approximately 1,000 years ago and eventually became the Inuit who today inhabit that region, spent the long winters living in impressive semisubterranean houses constructed of boulders, skins, pieces of cut turf, and the bones of bowhead whales. Most sites contain fewer than 10 houses, but some contain many more, leading to disagreement among archaeologists concerning Thule settlement patterns. This paper reviews the criteria archaeologists have used to identify contemporaneous houses at large Thule sites and identifies a new criterion tested at a site in the High Arctic. The 14 houses at the Porden Point site appear to have accumulated gradually through the abandonment of some houses and the construction of others. Therefore, the impressive appearance today of many Thule sites may not reflect their actual social/demographic nature.

Las gentes de la cultura Thule que penetraron el Ártico canadiense aproximadamente hace mil años, y que con el tiempo llegaron a ser los Inuit, quienes hasta el día de hoy habitan en esa región, habitaban durante los largos inviernos en impresionantes viviendas semisubterráneas construídas con cantos rodados, pieles, trozos de césped, y con los huesos de las ballenas “bowhead.” Muchos de sus yacimientos invernales contienen no más de diez viviendas, pero algunos contienen muchas más, y esto ha causado un desacuerdo entre los arqueólogos con respecto a los patrones de asentamiento Thule. En este trabajo se reseña los criterios que los arqueólogos han empleado para identificar viviendas contemporáneas en los asentamientos mayores de los Thule. Además, se pretende identificar un nuevo criterio que se somete a prueba en un yacimiento en el Ártico alto. Las catorce viviendas en el yacimiento Porden Point parecen haber sido acumuladas a través del abandono de algunas viviendas y de la construcción de otras. Por lo tanto, el aspecto impresionante actual de muchos yacimientos Thule podría no reflejar su naturaleza demográfica y social.

Type
Reports
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , April 1997 , pp. 273 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1997

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