Arctic Archaeology and Prehistory

The Arctic region in the northern hemisphere presented humans with dietary and temperature challenges and required a maritime sea mammal hunting or sea-ice adaptation. The colonization of this frigid and florally restricted environment occurred earlier than suspected, during the late Pleistocene c .27 000 years ago in northern Eurasia. In geographic terms, only northern Greenland, the coastal margins of Scandinavia, the Taymyr, and Alaska lie beyond the Arctic Circle. By contrast, sustained settlement of the North American High Arctic and Greenland did not occur until late in the Holocene, c .5000 years ago. Complex whaling societies developed in Bering Strait by 2000 years ago. For the most part, Arctic archaeology is synonymous with a single Mongoloid population, the Inuit (formerly Eskimo) who still dominate the region from Alaska to Greenland. A brief incursion between AD 900 and 1400 by the European Norse was renewed by Danish colonists in the early eighteenth century and continues to the present.