The Thule Migrations as an Analog for the Early Peopling of the Americas: Evaluating Scenarios of Overkill, Trade, Climate Forcing, and Scalar Stress

ABSTRACT

Coastal migration is linear and transport-reliant so that pre-Clovis coastal migration should be anticipated from its origin, as in the Thule migration, not its destination. Thule historiography, like Clovis, implicated a rapid, climate-forced migration by rapacious “over-killing” seal-hunters and whalers venturing into unoccupied high arctic landscapes—a model now insupportable. Thule datasets, from middens and numerous burials, include wood, ivory, and bone technologies that convey the factors promoting emigration: status striving, social inequality, and local overpopulation, but not an iron trade with Norse or Dorset. The emerging chronology situates the Thule migrations during a cooler thirteenth century while political ethnogeography records that ancestral Thule societies, Birnirk or Punuk, arose within a Bering Strait still dominated by Old Bering Sea culture. Data from the several Thule migrations, including lithic technology and ancient DNA, foster the re-examination of the coastal Beringian Standstill and Kelp highway scenarios, with a redirected focus on Sakhalin and Japan.

KEYWORDS:

• Bering Strait archaeology
• Neo-Inuit prehistory
• peopling of the Americas
• Alaska
• climate change
• warfare

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Owen K. Mason is Research Affiliate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His major areas of interest include the geoarchaeology and stratigraphy of Alaskan beach ridges and dunes, as well as the study of the aesthetics and designs of the Ipiutak, Old Bering Sea, and Birnirk cultures. He has published widely on all aspects of Alaskan prehistory and on coastal hazards. Dr Mason is involved in a multi-season project on Birnirk/Thule Origins at Cape Espenberg, Alaska.

Notes

1 On the role of tradition and religious belief in whaling: Murdoch (1892, 240) reported that “whale fishing at Port [sic] Barrow, in many ways the most important undertaking in the life of the natives, is so surrounded by superstitious observances, ceremonies to be performed, and other things of the same nature, as really to assume a distinctly religious character. Hence, we should naturally expect to find the implements used in it more or less archaic in form.” Further, Murdoch noted that when success (“bad luck”) in whaling occurred, as with the single whale obtained in 1883, the emic response was that the “first harpoon struck into the whale” should be a stone blade.

2 The question of contamination by anomalously old marine carbon within the Bering Strait water column is most important in Russian archaeology because Soviet archaeological practice favored the direct dating of both sea mammal and human bone. Several dozen radiocarbon ages from archaeofaunas and graves (Dinesman et al. 1999) still provide the most significant data set for Old Bering Sea culture in Chukotka. The correction of these ages employs one of two ΔR calculations, one based on a surface-feeding bowhead-whale trajectory, falling around 188 ± 27 yr (Khassanov and Savinetsky 2006) or ca. 200 years (Dyke, McNeely, and Hooper 1996), or within a range of ca. 700 years, assuming a bottom-feeding walrus diet (Dumond and Griffin 2002).

3 The radiocarbon dates for the Whale Alley locality were published in Arutiunov, Krupnik, and Chlenov (1982) and in Chlenov and Krupnik (1984, 14) as AD 1690 ± 30 (LE-1598), 1683 ± 40 (LE-1597) and 1790 ± 40 (LE-1636). Pitul’ko and Pavlova (2016, 134) claim that an inspection of laboratory records indicates that the dates were not correctly reported, the ages were actually presented within ¹⁴C yr BP. With the appropriate marine-carbon correction, the ages should be older than the seventeenth century AD, “at a minimum, 300 years,” rendering the monument’s construction not during the “improbable” Little Ice Age but to the beginning of the Little Climatic Optimum (i.e., Medieval Climate Anomaly), “about 1200 years ago.” The reasoning processes of both Krupnik (1993) and Pitul’ko and Pavlova (2016) outpace the radiocarbon data as presented. First, if the mandibles dated to the seventeenth or eighteenth century AD, clearly that was during the cooling that was proposed as a disaster by Krupnik. Second, if the laboratory forms were misinterpreted — a claim disputed by Krupnik (2018, pers. comm.), the 1800–1700 ¹⁴C yr BP ages are calibrated (with the 188 ± 27 yr correction; Khassanov and Savinetsky 2006) between AD 800 and 1000, during a cooler phase of the MCA, see discussion below.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number ARC-1523205].