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Old 23rd December 2010, 08:01 PM   #55
fearn
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The best book I've found on this is Ancient People of the Arctic by Robert McGhee. The settlement of the Arctic goes back to 2500 BCE or earlier (Independence culture), and the modern Eskimo spread out of the Alaskan area around 1000 CE. The nice thing about Arctic archeology is that (until climate change does its thing) stuff rarely changes. McGhee shows pictures of artifacts, old campfire rings, and the like, that are over 1000 years old.

The Arctic has been repeopled at least three times from the west (depending on where and how you count repeopling), and there's pretty good evidence that various groups have lost technology that their Siberian ancestors had each time.

One example is the bow. The archeological record pretty strongly indicates that the bow spread out of Siberia, that the Labrador Indians picked it up from the paleo-eskimos around 2000 BCE, and that archery technology spread south and west from Labrador to the rest of the Americas. This comes from dating the switch from spear-points to arrowheads, from noting that the earliest Indian arrowheads known (in Labrador) look like poor copies of the older paleo-eskimo arrowheads to the north, and from noting that arrowheads made out of Ramah chalcedony (a distinctive Labrador stone that works really nicely) were found south to New England and west to Ontario soon thereafter.

However, the widespread Dorset culture (which was replaced by the Eskimos by around 1000 CE) lost the skills of archery that their ancestors undoubtedly had.

The problem with living in the Arctic is that population densities are low, and if a disaster hits a small band of people, it can wipe out the only people who know how to do something. In recent times, this phenomenon was documented among polar Eskimos. One band lost the ability to make bows and kayaks, when all the experts died of the flu.

Rambling story, but it illustrates why iron-working never took hold among the eskimo. There were too few, and they probably couldn't have made a forge if they'd known how (what would they use for fuel?). There may have been trade for Siberian iron tools, but there's no evidence, and the Arctic is a pretty good place to look for such evidence. Even with the groups that used meteoric iron, I haven't found a good picture of one of their blades. Apparently the archeological evidence consists of tool handles missing blades, with rust spots in the permafrost showing where the meteoric blade rusted away.

Hope this clarifies things a bit.

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