Collaborative Research: Inglefield Land Archaeology Project IPY initiative: Dynamic social systems at the entrance to Greenland

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Co-Investigators Christyann Darwent (Department of Anthropology, University of California-Davis) and Genevieve LeMoine (Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum, Bowdoin College) will undertake archaeological excavation at two Thule/Inughuit sites in the summers of 2008 and 2009. The goal is to investigate the prehistoric-historic transition in this region, and to gain an understanding of this period of key culture contact and environmental change. The prehistoric-historic transition here dates to the 19th century. Sporadic contact with Euro-Americans began in 1818 when John Ross first anchored off Cape York, and became increasingly frequent after 1850. At the same time, (ca. 1860) the Inughuit assimilated into their society a group of migrants from Baffin Island. Both of these processes had major and lasting impacts on Inughuit society, and because both of them involved introducing, or re-introducing, important technologies, they are amenable to archaeological investigation. Technological studies, using a variety of approaches, will be used to understand how the Inughuit adopted new tools and materials into their activities, and what impact such changes had on their lives. The nineteenth century also saw the end of the Little Ice Age, with increased warming accompanied by as-yet undocumented changes in the abundance and distribution of plants and animals. Studies of both economically important animals and the insect fauna of the sites will address questions of the timing and scope of these changes, as well as the Inughuit?s responses to them.Sites have been selected on the basis of surveys conducted by the team in 2004 and 2005. In 2008 the team will excavate late-prehistoric/early historic winter dwellings at Cape Grinnell, a site first identified by Elisha Kent Kane in the1850s as having recently abandoned houses. In 2009 the research team will focus its efforts on Qaqaitsut, a winter village, occupied from ca. AD 1200 to as recently as the 1980s. Houses and adjacent middens will be excavated. They will also map both of these multi-component sites in detail. At Cape Grinnell, a geomorphological study will help the team understand the development of beach ridges, which have been occupied for over 4000 years. The investigators will be addressing questions of basic culture history; culture contact, both between indigenous groups and between Euro-Americans and Inuit; adaptation to the changing polar environment; and mammalian biogeography. This project is part of NSF?s investment in International Polar Year research. The project is an international collaborative one with researchers from the United States, Canada, Denmark and Greenland (including members of the local Inughuit communities).