The Aboriginal peoples of
the Circumpolar North are the descendants or successors of peoples who
originally inhabited the temperate zones of the Old World. The debate is still
on about the origins and ancestry of modern humans but, wherever they came
from or the routes they took, by some 45-35,000 years ago at least, humans
much like us had spread from Africa across the southern parts of Europe,
Russia and Asia.
At the time, the "North" lay much closer to the Equator
than it is now. The world was in the grip of the Last Ice Age: ice sheets
still covered Scandinavia, northern Europe, the Ural Mountains, parts of
Siberia and of the northern Far East, most of Canada, quite a bit of the
northern part of the US, all of Greenland and Iceland (see accompanying map).
The ice sheets changed the climate and landscape, creating a band of dry,
cold, treeless steppe-tundra below them.4
In that steppe-tundra, large herds of huge animals roamed, including mammoth,
woolly rhinoceros, horse, bison and saiga antelope.5
Humans, adapted to hunting such large mammals, flourished in the river valleys
from central Europe to the Ukraine and beyond, in central Asia and along the
Pacific coast.
The First Peoples in the "North"
The first peoples in the cold, dry
regions of the Asian continent are found in southern Siberia in the Altai
Mountains, the Aldan River valley, the area around Lake Baikal and in the
upper parts of the Amur River system. This pattern of colonization suggest
that people migrated from more southern homelands. What motivated them is
still uncertain, though it may likely have been better hunting.
We don't know a great deal about these first
northerners. Archaeologists seem to agree that they probably were not all
related to the Europeans of the time. The style and assortment of tools that a
people uses is often distinctive, enough so that the tools found in
archaeological sites can tell quite a bit about the humans who made and used
them. The earliest Siberian tools, found at sites in the Altai and Sayan
mountains and in the area around Lake Baikal, are not at all similar to
European tools of the same or earlier periods. Other sites, on the other hand,
do yield tools that have some European traits. So, the thinking goes, some
people did come across the European Plain and over (or around) the Ural
Mountains, and some moved northward from other, central or southern Asian
homelands. This map shows the paths that humans took to people Siberia, the
Far East, Europe, western Russia, and Scandinavia. The heavy green line
represents the Ural Mountains, a barrier to ancient peoples'
movements.
Fairly Primitive Technologies
In the earliest stages of occupation, the technologies were still
fairly primitive. Nevertheless the newcomers had the skills to hunt the large
herd animals that roamed the cold steppe/tundra lands before the ice sheets.
These "megafauna" included extinct and still living animals such as the
mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, reindeer, horse and antelope. They lived in
semi-subterranean dwellings often ringed with mammoth bones and roofed with
reindeer antlers that supported a hide covering. In summer they likely used
skin tents. We don't know how they clothed themselves, and we don't find firm
evidence of needles, which imply sewn clothing, until about 28,000 years ago
and that's from the Lake Baikal region.
There may have been people in the northern part of
European Russia. A recent (2001) find6
near the Arctic Circle in the northern Urals, on a bank of the Usa River, of
stone tools, animal bones and a mammoth tusk with grooves cut into it,
suggests there may have been. The radiocarbon dates have indicated the organic
material is about 40,000 years old. Before this discovery, people were not
thought to have moved so far north in the area west of the Ural Mountains.
There, the most northern site known before is at Sungir, near Vladimir (56º
08' N., 40º 24' E.), which dates to around 26,000 BCE. The Sungir people, too,
were mammoth hunters, who, we know from evidence, adorned themselves with
beads and buried their dead with jewellery.
Palaeolithic in Siberia
The Palaeolithic (Old Stone
Age) of Siberia spans roughly 15,000-20,000 years from about 45-35,000 to
around 20,000 BCE. The cultural and technological features of the peoples who
occupied portions of Siberia and the Far East vary from time and place.
However, in general, they were large-animal hunters with a fairly
unsophisticated tool kit. This does not mean they were limited culturally.
They were not: They carved art figures and jewellery and may have buried their
dead in ritual ways. The earliest sites (see Figure 4, right) are found in the
upper reaches7
of the major Siberian rivers and of their southernmost tributaries (for
example, the Ob' and the Yenisei). Other early sites are found in the region
on the southeast side of Lake Baikal (for example, on the Khilok River, a
tributary of the Selenga, which flows into Lake Baikal) and in the Aldan River
area (an upper tributary of the Lena River). They spread gradually and, about
25,000 BCE, first venture north of the Arctic Circle during a period of milder
temperatures.
More Sophisticated Technologies
About 20,000 BCE, the early
Siberians developed more sophisticated stone tool technologies that allowed
them to produce greater lengths of cutting edges from a given amount of
stone.7a
The highest achievement of this tool technology was the tiny, generally
rectangular, stone blades, called "microliths"8
or "microblades." These blades were, in many respects like the razor blades of
today. They could be inserted into a wood or bone handle to create a knife or
arrow head but when they dulled, could be easily replaced. Archaeologists see
these tools as an indication of the transition to the Mesolithic (Middle Stone
Age). This technological invention proved to be highly successful and persists
in Siberia for over 12,000 years and is found in northwest North America even
later. Older technology also persists in places until about 15,000 BCE.
Deglaciation Around the Globe
Around 15,000 BCE deglaciation begins to be felt across the
globe. This is not a smooth process. There are periods in which the climate
cooled again and glaciers and the ice sheets advanced. We know that people
were occupying the upper reaches of the Yenisei River valley (Mal'ta-Afontova
tradition) and the Aldan River region (Diuktai tradition). By 13,000 BCE,
there are people pretty well all over Siberia and the Far East. Archaeologists
have found the remains of a camp at Berelekh on the Arctic coast at the mouth
of the Indigirka River and there is evidence of seasonal occupation of coastal
areas by salmon fishers at the south end of the Sea of Okhotsk. A thousand
years later, Diuktai people are widespread over northeast Asia.
Several Explanations of the Peopling of the
Americas
It is likely that by this
time, too, people had moved into northern North America and may have migrated
south as well. The matter of when people first colonized the Americas is not
settled. Archaeological and other biological evidence suggests that the source
population was southeast Asian or early Asian, rather than northern Asian, as
has generally been thought.
The traditional explanation is that people living in
northeastern Asia followed mammoth and other large herbivores across the
Bering Land Bridge: the continental shelf that joins Alaska and the Chukotka
peninsulas when exposed by the drastically lowered sea levels (see Figure 6,
right). Certainly, similarities in stone tool technology suggests that the
northern people came from Siberia. Then there are genetic and other biological
indicators that seem to point to a more southern Siberian point of
origin.
The traditional scientific
explanation is that there were three or four waves of peoples from Siberia who
crossed the Bering Land Bridge. Once in Alaska, people were thought to have
penetrated inland, into the Yukon Territory and then moved south through the
"Ice-Free Corridor," a gap between the cordilleran (flowing outward from
the Coastal and Rocky Mountains) and continental ice sheets (flowing outward
from the Arctic Archipelago) to the North American Plains. This theory is much
disputed. Many archaeologists prefer the idea that people moved south along
the coasts, which would have been much wider, again because of the lower sea
levels. But the cordilleran ice sheets extended out onto the continental
shelves and people who had lived by hunting large land animals might not make
the transition to a marine-oriented life very easily. Other scholars propose
that marine-oriented people could have crossed the Pacific or travelled along
the coast in boats (see Figure 7).9
On the plains, as highly adept large animal hunters, they are thought to have
reproduced so successfully that very quickly these people, called Clovis after
the location of the type-site in the United States, spread into South America
and northward into eastern Canada as the ice retreated.
A second wave was thought to have occurred several
millennia later. These people are thought to have been the ancestors of the
Athapaskan peoples of north-eastern North America. The third and fourth waves
are believed to have been of two Arctic-adapted peoples who used the same
territory but the second replaced the first. The latter group, the Thule, are
understood to be the ancestors of today's Inuit peoples across the North from
the Chukotka Peninsula to Greenland.
Nowadays, this interpretation of events is under
question. What makes the matter so problematic is that there are
archaeological sites in South America that appear to be contemporary or even
older than sites further north. It seems, to many scholars, unlikely that
people were able to spread from Alaska to South America in such a short space
of time, adapting their lifeways so radically to the different environments
through which they passed. Finding an answer consumes the energies of a large
number of scholars. What we can say, though, and with some scientific
certainty, is that are microblade-using people in Alaska by around 9000
BC.
Developments Between 11,000-8500 BCE
By 11,000 BCE, environmental
conditions improve and warm in the Russian Plains. Forests invade and the vast
herds of large steppe-dwelling herbivores begin to decline. Humans move in,
turning to a different kind of prey, mainly elk. Across Siberia, elk hunters
began to predominate. This way of life lasted in some places until about 5000
BCE and a bit later, about 4500 BCE, in others.
Only a thousand years or so later, we find the first
known dwelling sites of boreal forest hunters in southern Sweden and evidence
of people moving northward from the American Plains into southern Alberta,
Canada. Ice has retreated from much of Karelia and also from the Queen
Charlotte Islands off the west coast of British Columbia. People have
colonized the Kamchatka Peninsula. Across Siberia and the Far East there is an
increase in the regionalization of peoples and cultures. Some anthropologists
suggest that it is at about this time that it is possible to detect a
differentiation among the ancestors of today's Chukchi, Eskimo, Koryak and
Yukagir. Central Alaska and parts of the Aleutian Island chain are
occupied.
After about 8,500 BCE, the pace of people moving into
the North increases all over the world, except in northern Canada, Greenland
and Iceland. The remains of a net and floats, found in 1914 in a ancient lake
bottom site near Antrea in southern Karelia, speaks of a people living in the
area around the Gulf of Finland who fished from boats. Soon after, we find
evidence of people (Fosna Culture) occupying the middle coasts and northern
coasts of Norway. A different cultural group moved a bit later into the fjords
of the Arctic coast of northern Norway. The first settlers reach the southern
edges of Finland, probably from south and east of there. In North America,
people move into the Great Slave and Great Bear lakes areas. Forests are
recolonizing the southern Yukon.
Developments Between 8000-5000 BCE
In the next millennia, people begin
to occupy the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America, the Canadian Shield
area and the Barren Grounds of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, west of
Hudson Bay. Around 7000 BCE, people in Finland (Suomusjärvi) begin to use
pottery as do peoples in the region around Lake Baikal. People using the
distinctive microblades reach eastern Alaska and Kodiak Island. The first
people move into the Torne River valley at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia.
There is further colonization of northern Siberia as the climate warmed
slightly.
By about 6000 BCE, ocean levels had reached only 3-5
metres below contemporary levels. Bodies of water now divide landmasses, for
example, the English Channel has developed. People living in the Aleutian
Islands had fully adapted to a marine-oriented lifestyle and the peoples of
the North American Pacific Northwest, too, had a fully developed
coast-oriented (or littoral) lifestyle. Peoples were occupying a site on the
Colville River in northern Alaska. Microblade-using people are living in the
southwestern Yukon, in the Kluane and Aishihik10
Lake area. Glacial Lake Agaziz (which covered much of the plains of northern
United States and Canada west of the Great Lakes below the retreating ice
sheets) was greatly reduced if not entirely gone and we find peoples moving
into northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
Developments Between 5000-2000 BCE
By 5000 BCE people occupy
most parts of the Circumpolar North. In Siberia and the Far East, we find
Neolithic (New Stone Age) cultures firmly entrenched, in the Yenisei, Angara
and Lena basins as well as on Chukotka and Kamchatka. There seems to be
little evidence for widespread occupation of the cold Arctic shores of the
Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, or Beaufort Seas at this time. People in
Finnmark, northern Scandinavia, are changing lifestyles somewhat; apparently
there is a slow change to smaller, single-family dwellings. The Canadian
Shield area--west of Hudson Bay and the region east of the Mackenzie River--is
more widely occupied. In the Fertile Crescent region of southern Asia, farming
is occurring and the knowledge of it is beginning to spread (see map for
location). The knowledge and practice of farming will later form the basis for
the distinction of peoples into two main groups: those who farm and those who
hunt as the main subsistence approach.
At around 4000 BCE, ocean levels are more or less the
same as today's. There is evidence of primitive farming in southern Sweden and
Norway. The first Athapaskan peoples inhabit Alaska and we find the first
indications of a new culture of Arctic-adapted people as well. The Neolithic
cultures continue to develop and change in Siberia and the Far East.
A thousand years later there is
evidence of people occupying the Kola Peninsula and of a Neolithic culture in
Karelia. There is an immigration of Finno-Ugric-speaking peoples into Finland
who may have merged with the resident population. The ancestors of the Nenets
may have split from the Finno-Ugric group and migrated eastward. We find
evidence of Arctic-adapted tundra dwellers (the Arctic Small Tool tradition,
or ASTt) on the Bering Sea coast, who may have migrated from northeastern Asia
to Alaska. The ASTt people combined exploitation of the sea with that of the
land and were accomplished sea-mammal and caribou hunters.
During the next millennium, people spread some more and
develop more complex cultures. Indeed, at this point, there is a strong
possibility that some of them are the ancestors of today's northern peoples.
By about 2,500 BCE, people have occupied most regions of North America,
including the Arctic. The microblade-using peoples have moved into the western
part of the Northwest Territories and north of them, we find more extensive
occupation of the Arctic. People have reached the northern parts of Greenland,
which suggests that they crossed over to Greenland from Ellesmere Island. This
first Greenland culture is known as Independence I.11
Over the next few hundred years, we witness more expansion and, in some
places, new peoples. We find Pre-Dorset sites in many places across the North
American Arctic, characterized by a highly miniaturized tool kit.
Developments Between 2000-1000 BCE
By 2000 BCE, the ancestors of the
Khanty are nomadic horse-breeders in the Irtysh basin and are in contact with
hunting peoples to the north of them in the Ural Mountains. A more advanced
Neolithic culture develops in the Aldan River basin in the Far East. Other
cultures continue to elaborate and expand their territories. In Scandinavia, a
new people, using characteristic polished slate axes moves into the southern
parts of Finland, and the southern inhabitants of Sweden and Norway begin to
use copper and bronze. It may be about this time, too, that the ancestors of
the Sami (sometimes called Proto-Sami) are beginning to occupy the northern
parts of the Scandinavian Peninsula.12
In northern Greenland, the Independence I culture continues (lasting another
five hundred years or so) (the coin in the picture of Independence I
microtools measures 17 mm across). A related culture is now found on the
Labrador coasts (to about 1400 BCE). Palaeo-Eskimo ("old Eskimo") peoples are
found across the eastern Arctic.13
The ASTt people are spreading out, into the Canadian Arctic Islands, and on
the mainland coasts of Coronation Gulf and Foxe Basin. In the west of North
America, a marine-oriented people, the Palaeo-Aleuts occupy the Aleutian
Islands, living in small communities of single-family dwellings. Along the
Northwest Coast, there is continued development of the cultures with some
changes on Kodiak Island.
Around 1800 BCE, there is a deterioration in the
climate, certainly in the Canadian Arctic and possibly elsewhere as well. The
ASTt people are forced to abandon their ocean settlements and retreat to the
northern edges of the boreal forest. In the centuries following, people move
into the Pelly River drainage of the Yukon Territory. In Alaska, there is a
shift, around 1600 BC, from the ASTt to a new culture, called Choris. The
Choris people had a more varied economy and used pottery, which suggests they
either didn't move around as much as the people who preceded them or they had
reliable forms of transportation.14
Another change that occurs around this time is the rise of a new culture in
Greenland, the Saqqaq15
culture, who kept dogs.
At 1500 BCE, metal is coming into use in Karelia and
Sakha. The bow and arrow, an important advance in hunting technology, comes
into use in the Arctic. And soon after that, we find the Old Whaling Culture
developing on the west coast of Alaska and the eastern shores of Chukotka. A
hundred years later, we know that the Pre-Dorset of Labrador have passed into
the Late phase, and that the Saqqaq Culture is flourishing in Disko Bay area
of Greenland. Soon after that, we see the rise of a new variant of the ASTt,
known as the Canadian Tundra. These were a distinctive caribou-adapted people
who occupied the tundra-taiga area of central northern Canada. They may have
had either contact or conflict with the Palaeo-Eskimo, who again were forced
into the Barren Lands area of the eastern Northwest Territories and southern
Nunavut, probably because of a shift in climate.
Developments Between 1000-1 BCE
By 1000 BCE, the Circumpolar World is
getting to be a busy place. Peoples are moving, rippling across the landscape
and filling up the good spots, where resources are dependable. In many
instances, peoples are encountering others and trading useful techniques. In
Greenland, despite deteriorating climatic conditions, the Independence II
culture occupies the northeast part of the island. Dorset people are occupying
the North American Arctic from the Mackenzie Delta to Greenland. In the Yukon,
people are occupying the area around Fort Selkirk on the Yukon River. In
northern Alaska, there is an astonishing diversification of cultures (partly
because of its astonishing variety of climatic zones). Archaeologists
recognize about four different cultures: Choris, Norton, near-Ipiutak, and
Ipiutak.16
The climate must have been milder in this area, because there is a
recognizable maritime culture on Wrangel Island off the north coast of the
Chukotka Peninsula. Further south, in the Anadyr River basin, a well-developed
reindeer-hunting people is firmly established. Southern Siberia is entering a
period of large-scale migrations and of the advance of herding peoples of the
steppes into the taiga.17
Other peoples moving, though it might have been earlier, are the Ugrians, from
their possible homeland west of the Ural Mountains in the Irtysh River basin
steppe northward into the forest.18
On the middle and upper reaches of the Kama River (Perm area), Komi ancestors
are flourishing.
The next five hundred years is witness to more moderate
changes. Early Iron Age people move into Scotland's Hebrides, Dorset culture
moves into Greenland and Labrador. There is a certain amount of cultural
change in the area around Lake Baikal (which, by this point, isn't really in
the North anymore) and we see a shift from settled cultures to nomadic,
mounted war-oriented ones, largely influenced by a new group of steppe
peoples, the Scythians. The movements of these steppe peoples becomes a major
influence on the peopling of the North, as we shall see.
By 500 BCE, the ancestors of today's Finns may have
arrived in Scandinavia and pushed the ancestral Sami northward.19
In southern Scandinavia, the peoples there have begun to use iron. It is also
thought that it is about this time that an expedition from Carthage sailed
north from the Straits of Gibraltar to discover the source of tin, which at
the time came from southwest Britain.20
In Alaska, the Norton, near-Ipiutak and Ipiutak cultures are predominant
across the northwestern part of the state. From the inland of Alaska to the
Mackenzie River and further east and south into British Columbia, the
Athapaskan languages are differentiating. In the central part of the Northwest
Territories and into southern Nunavut, the Taltheilei Shale Tradition shows
the re-occupation of the boreal forests by Indian peoples after the departure
of the Palaeo-Eskimo.
A century later, we see the beginnings of the northward
migration of the Yakut from the Lake Baikal region to the area around the
upper Lena (see footnote 7). Again, this is likely the result of the northward
movement of peoples occupying the regions to the south of them. About this
time, too, the Independence II culture departs from Peary Land in northern
Greenland. This is also the beginning of the period (to about CE 1400) in
which we see the expansion, occupation and consolidation of Athapaskan peoples
on the upper Thelon River of the eastern Mackenzie District.
At 300 BCE, we find the Middle Dorset culture in
Greenland, some of the Canadian Shield peoples using pottery, and a
recolonization of some of the Aleutian Islands by peoples from the mainland.
Soon after, the Taltheilei Shale people in the Northwest Territories and
southern Nunavut undergo a moderate change in their culture and, at the same
time begin to expand their territory, which covered the area from Great Slave
Lake to the lower Coppermine and Thelon rivers. On the coasts of mainland
Alaska, the Norton tradition is well-developed and extends from the Alaska
Peninsula to the mouth of the Firth River in the Yukon Territory. In central
Asia, a new mounted people, the Huns, caused a great deal of jostling among
the peoples occupying territories to the north. Turkic-speaking peoples move
into southwestern Siberia and push the Uralic Ugrians and Samoyeds further
north.21
One Samoyed-speaking people, the Nenets, encounter and mix with some of these
new Turkic-Altaic peoples.22
By 100 BCE, Germanic peoples dominate the area of
northern Europe from Trondheim, Norway to the Åland Islands, to the plains
between the Rhine and Neisse rivers. It is from this period that we have the
earliest evidence of human activity at Trondheim--plough marks. During the
last century BCE, we find evidence that the Kamchadal (or Itelmen), Koryak,
and Chukchi23
entered the Far Northeast from the west and found the coastal areas already
occupied by a population related to the Eskimo.24
Developments Between 1-500 CE
At
the beginning of the Common Era, the world, the North and the northern peoples
was about to change in ways even more dramatic than had been seen before. At
this point, the Saqqaq culture replaced by Dorset in Greenland. The Dorset
have colonized much of the coastal areas of Labrador and Newfoundland(to CE
600). Elsewhere in the Canadian North, peoples are spreading out throughout
the Shield region, even to the coasts of Hudson Strait and northern Quebec.
Peoples in the central Canadian North continue much as they had for centuries
before. In Alaska, Norton culture is replaced by Ipiutak in the zone north of
Bering Strait, whose culture is known for its art objects and burials and in
the south a modified Norton develops with ceramics, oil lamps, and polished
slate objects. Elsewhere on the Alaska coast, we see the development and
flourishing of Kachemak III culture that spans the 1st millennium of the
Common Era. Along the coast of the Gulf of Alaska, there is the first evidence
of occupation of Prince William Sound. In most parts of Alaska and northern
Canada, as well as along the Northwest Coast, it is about this time (give or
take a hundred years or so) that microlithic industries come to an end.
In the Bering Strait region, we also
the earliest indisputable evidence of Eskimo occupation of the coastal region
of northeast Siberia found in the Bering Strait. Here we find a fully
developed maritime culture replaced by the Old Bering Sea phase (to about CE
700). The Old Bering Sea people hunted sea mammals (primarily walrus and seal,
though possibly the occasional whale), had hand-drawn sleds and pottery, used
ulus,25
wore tailored clothing and carried on trade with iron-using societies to the
west (you can see some of their hunting tools in the accompanying photograph).
Some scholars see that the beginning of the Common Era signals the end of the
domination of the Russian North by the last remnants of the ancient Siberian
tribes, holdovers from the archaeological past. The pressure to expand and
move exerted by the southern and adjacent peoples gradually drives the ancient
peoples to the furthest northeast corner of the continent.
On the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, the ancestors of the
Koryak were a coastal people who hunted sea mammals. In the central parts of
Siberia, and to the east, reindeer-breeding becomes known to a number of
peoples. The Yakut may have learned it from the horse-breeding steppe people
and applied it to the most easily domesticated animal available in their new
territory. It is also possible that they learned the techniques from the
Evenki, a Tungus (see note 22)
people, as they migrated north. Yet they were not the only ones developing the
skills. The use of reindeer as draught or decoy animals was becoming
widespread across the northern Euro-Asian region.
In Europe, the Roman Empire
had reached northward to the edges of the known world.26
In the centuries since it had brought Gaul, Germania and Britannia into its
orbit, the Empire had established a massive trade network. Thus, in the first
century of the Common Era, maritime and overland trade reaches Scandinavia
from southern Europe, Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. The soon-to-be Norse
received Roman arms, bronze and metal objects, wine, pottery and coin in
exchange for furs, slaves, amber, feathers, and wild beasts for the Roman
civic amphitheatres. The quantity of this trade was so vast that scholars
often refer to this period as the Roman Iron Age in Scandinavia. The need for
trade goods encouraged expansion of the Scandinavian systems of supply. Thus,
more and more, non-Sami peoples visited the northern-most regions and had
contact with the Sami.
The second century looks fairly quiet from a northern
perspective. Many of the established northern cultures were well-developed and
not to change radically for many centuries. There is evidence of some
migration in the Far East and Far Northeast: the ancestors or proto-Yukagir,
an ancient Siberian population derived from the Ust-Belaya archaeological
culture, which had spread from Taymyr to the Anadyr area, emigrate to Sea of
Okhotsk. At about the same time, and perhaps related, there is a Chukchi
migration to the north coast. As they move, they repeatedly assimilate peoples
in their path, adopting cultural and linguistic elements from them. In the
Bering Strait region, on the Siberian coast and on St. Lawrence Island, we
find Thule culture occupation.
In the third century CE, the Roman peace collapses.
Inflation, civil war, peasant uprisings, and German invasions wreck the
progress of the preceding centuries. By the time of Diocletian (284-305), the
rupture was sealed. What remained was not what it once was. Cities well inside
the frontier began to construct walls around themselves for protection. Rome
was forced to neglect much of its north European holdings and concentrate on
feeding its citizens and slaves at home. The loss of the output of its
northern provinces, however, meant a serious decline in the quantity of
foodstuffs moving to Rome.
In addition to the very real collapse
of much of Roman order in northern Europe, the third century is also the
beginning of the völkerwanderungen.27
For more than three centuries, whole peoples move across the face of Europe
and some even batter on the gates of Rome itself (see the map of the
"Barbarian Migrations"). The Huns most likely started it all by moving west
into the lands of the ancestral Ostrogoths and Goths, but the result is the
redrawing of the map Europe by the time it was all over.
In the fourth century, Rome loses dominion of the
northern seas and becomes a fortified empire. Attempts to improve efficiency
are made by increasing regimentation in all aspects of life. This inevitably
leads to massively increased costs of bureaucracy. As a result, the empire
loses its initiative and ceases to expand. The opportunities for trade in
northern goods declines, though they don't cease entirely.28
There is evidence that the Hebrides, Scotland, and Norway sent furs, wild
beasts, and feathers from sea birds to Roman markets. Linguistic evidence,
loan words from foreign languages primarily, shows that the Sami on Norwegian
coast adjacent to the Lofoten-Vesterålen islands had been influenced by some
aspects of Nordic culture since the early Iron Age and that substantial
linguistic borrowing occurred from the 4th century onwards.29
This implies that trade does not vanish with the loss of easy access to the
Roman markets. Elsewhere, in the Far East of Asia, the Chukchi are expanding
into the Anadyr lowlands. In the north coastal areas, the Birnirk culture
begins to develop in the Asian Eskimo zone on the tip of Chukotka and along
its coats as well as across the Bering Strait on the coast of western Alaska.
Birnirk people settled mainly along the Chukchi Sea coast and specialized in
seal hunting, those across the Bering Strait, at Point Barrow, hunted
whale.
The fifth century is again a relatively quiet one for,
and in, the North. It marks the beginning of a roughly five-hundred-year
period in Arctic Alaska where none of the cultures extant are whalers. In the
Yukon, the Aishihik Phase begins, the last prehistoric Athapaskan culture. It
persists until the first explorers and settlers enter the region in the 1840s,
who introduce new tools and new complications. In the Northwest Territories,
we find a new Taltheilei Shale Tradition complex in the Great Slave-Great Bear
lakes region. Late Dorset culture is found in Greenland, which lasts until
about 1500. By mid-century, the Huns threaten Europe, and Angles, Saxons,
Jutes and Frisians30
have invaded Britain. The Vandals and Suevi, Alans and Burgundians have swept
through western Gaul and Belgium. Just after mid-century, the Vandals sack
Rome. Clovis becomes the first Frankish chieftain in 481 and soon begins to
expand his territories.31
The Age of Migrations is pretty much over. The next few centuries will see
European peoples, of a variety of ethnic backgrounds, struggle to delineate
territory and to establish hierarchies and social relations. Christianity will
filter out to the edges of Europe and beyond. In time, the peoples of the
North will come to their attention more forcefully. Soon, but not just
yet.
Conclusion
By about 500 BCE, the European world is emerging. In the near
future, nations will begin to be defined and lines of monarchies established.
Christianity spreads throughout most of western Europe and penetrates
occasionally into the settled places of the southern parts of northern Europe.
Trade connections develop strength. Not, perhaps, immediately, but within
about 400 years, the North will enter the European consciousness in a new
way.
[Next
part...]
Notes
4. This web page, from the
German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ), shows the differences between the
world's temperatures today and those of about 18,000 years ago: <http://www.dkrz.de/dkrz/broschuere-eng/research/iceage.html>.
5. This web page, from
the Yukon Beringia Centre, links to short descriptions of typical Ice Age
animals and other related material: <http://www.beringia.com/02/02maina.html>.
6. The Mamontovaya Kurya
site is located at 66º 34' N. 62º 25' E. A short description of the find was
published by Pavel Pavlov, John Inge Svendsen, and Svein Indrelid in
Nature 413, 64-7 (06 Sep 2001).
7. In the case of the
north-flowing rivers, this means the southernmost ends of them. Rivers flow
from higher elevations to lower ones, so we refer to the higher end as the
"upper" and the downstream end as the "lower."
7a. André Leroi-Gourhan.
The Hunters of Prehistory. Translated by Claire Jacobson (New York:
Atheneum, 1989).
8. Micro- means small,
-lith refers to stone. The Stone Age Reference Collection web site is a "guide
to the Typology, Technology, and Raw Materials of the Stone Age." You can find
out more about microliths and microblades there: <http://www.hf.uio.no/iakk/roger/lithic/microliths.html>.
9. Another explanation is
that people crossed the North Atlantic, skirting the edge of the ice sheets to
colonise the Americas.
10. Pronounced
AY-shee-yak.
11. Independence I sites
are also known in the Western Canadian Arctic, on Banks and Victoria
islands.
12. There is quite a bit
of uncertainty about this. Some sources maintain that the Sami are descended
from the earliest northern peoples, the Komsa, while others, based on the
relation of their languages to Finnish and other Finno-Ugrian languages,
believe that the ancestral population migrated from some place in the southern
Ural mountains to the north. The dates for that migration vary, from about
2000 BC to about 1000 BC.
13. It is not entirely
clear if some scholars are calling the Labrador Independence I peoples
Palaeo-Eskimos or if there are two different peoples. There is often
uncertainty in these matters.
14. Pottery is, in the
main, pretty fragile, and it would not have been a good container for valuable
food items or liquids if people were carrying them and, potentially, dropping
them. This is how we can infer that they were not moving around quite as much.
A sled with carefully tied covers would also make moving pottery containers
worry-free. That's why we can speculate that they had good
transportation.
15. You may also see it
written Sarqaq.
16. For more information
on these cultures, see David Damas, ed., The Handbook of North American
Indians, Vol. 5: The Arctic (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution,
1984).
17. This movement is
caused by a number of factors, but in general, people moving northward into
the steppes, with better technologies caused the contemporary occupants to
move out of their way, that is, to the north.
18. We've mentioned this
northward migration earlier, at about 2000 BC, because some scholars think it
may have occurred that early.
19. I mention this
because it's interesting just how uncertain we are about how and when things
happened. The source for this date, 500 BCE, for the Sami moving north, is the
online Encyclopedia Brittanica.
20. The sources are very
vague for this and it may be a mix-up with a journey a couple of hundred years
later, which we'll mention in the next section.
21. Here we're using
language families instead of the names of individual peoples. Briefly, the
Finno-Ugric and Samoyed languages are both branches of a large language family
called Uralic. There are about thirty Uralic languages, spoken by more than 20
million people, spread from northern Norway (Sami), across northern Europe,
northwestern Russia, and the north part of Western Siberia to the Taymyr
Peninsula. The Finno-Ugric branch divides into two major groups, the Finnic
and the Ugric. The main representative of the Ugric languages is Hungarian,
but a second branch, the Ob-Ugrian, includes Khanty and Mansi. The Finnic
languages include Estonian, Finnish, Sami, Karelian, and Komi. The Samoyedic
languages branched away from Uralic earlier than the other two and now account
for the descendant languages Nenets, Selk'up, Nganasan and Enets. For more
information on northern languages, see the Ethnologue web site: <http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/RusA.html>.
22. Altaic languages
include three main branches, Mongolian (languages spoken in China, Mongolia
and Afghanistan today), Tungus (Even, Evenki, Negidal and other languages
spoken in China and on the southern coast of the Russian Far East) and Turkic
(the northern branch, with eight languages, includes Dolgan and Yakut. Tracing
the paths that languages have taken can often help to understand the movement
of peoples from place to place over centuries. For more information and
language family trees, see the Ethnologue web site: <http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/RusA.html>.
23. Given this
digression into languages, it is interesting to note that these three peoples
are all speakers of languages belonging to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family. It
could well be that the immigrants spoke one language that became
differentiated when they settled down in different areas. For more
information, of course, see the Ethnologue site.
24. The Eskimo of this
period and their descendants speak languages belonging to the Eskimo-Aleut
family. The Aleut branch has only one language, while the Eskimo branch has
ten (though many of the them are similar enough that with ear training, Inuit
in Nunavut can enjoy Greenlandic television programming. See Ethnologue for
further details.
25. An ulu is a
semicircular knife with a T-shaped handle, used in most Arctic cultures by
women for preparing food.
26. Rome, under Julius
Caesar, brings Gaul (France) into the empire after the Gallic Wars of 57-55
BCE. Immediately after, he turns his attention to Britain. He invades for the
first time in 55 BCE and again in 54 BCE. He dies a decade later and leaves
the Roman Empire in great upheaval. In 43 BCE, Britain is conquered by
Claudius. After 31 BCE, with the peace of Augustus, the Roman Empire shines.
The Pax Romana continues for two hundred years. Roman rule is beneficial, with
new crops, new fruits and new agricultural methods. Wine-making was introduced
in Gaul. In CE 43, Rome invades England again and wins. Britannia becomes a
Roman province. London is founded. By about CE 75-77, the Roman conquest of
Britain is finished. In the second century, northern European trade grew on
the back of the Roman agricultural, industrial and mining investments. But at
all sides, the barbarians hovered. In CE 122, Hadrian build his wall against
the Picts. The Germans are pressing against the frontier in the east. Much has
been written about Roman history. Check your library.
27. This is a German
word that means something like "people+wandering." It is the usual name for
this period.
28. Here, then, is a
very early example of how events in the South can have effect in the
North.
29. This linguistic
evidence suggests that there was more-or-less regular contact between the
southern Scandinavian peoples and the Sami from a very early
time.
30. These peoples
occupied the northern part of the European lowlands. They claimed territories
in and near Denmark and the southern part of Scandinavia. Indeed, some
scholars say the Angles were a Scandinavian people.
31. Clovis's
accomplishment is often used as a marker event in the development of
contemporary European nations. His descendants eventually managed to establish
control over much of the area that is now France.
Picture credits
- Ice Age cover, source unrecorded.
- Regions occupied by the first peoples in the North, Amanda
Graham.
- Initial spread of peoples into the North, Amanda
Graham.
- Map of Central and Northern Asia showing the approximate
locations of some of the earliest human-occupied sites. Amanda Graham with
Xerox PARC map and data from Derev'anko, Paleolithic of Siberia,
352.
- Microliths.
Source: Stone Age
Reference Collection, Institute of Archaeology (I.A.K.K.) at the
University of Oslo, Norway.
- Beringia. Base map, "Map of Beringia at the
height of the last glaciation," from Yukon Beringia Centre web site.
Additional colouring by Amanda Graham.
- Possible routes to the
peopling of North America. Image originally appeared in E. James Dixon's
article "Coastal Navigators--The First Americans May Have Come by Water,"
Discovering Archaeology, Feb. 2000. This image is the reproduction of
the image on the Clovis and
Beyond website.
- North American areas mentioned in the text, Amanda
Graham.
- Suomusjarvi quartz
tools. Source is "The prehistory of Finland," web page from The National
Board of Antiquities, The National Museum of Finland.
- Location of the Fertile Crescent. There are many copies of
this map on the Internet. I got this copy from a student
web page.
- Paleo-Eskimo dwelling reconstruction. Canadian Museum of
Civilization, "Lost
Visions, Forgotten Dreams: The Paleo-Eskimos," web exhibition.
- Independence I microtools. "Independence
I Stone Tools. Tiny stone tools such as these, found scattered in the
gravel around tent camps, were used to tip the weapons and tools of the
Independence I people. Clockwise from the upper left are two triangular
endblades for harpoons; a tanged arrow point; an endscraper for working
hides; two burin spalls, which may have been used as miniature engraving
tools; and two burins used in working bone or other hard organic materials.
The scale of these objects is indicated by the Canadian dime (seventeen
millimetres in diameter). Courtesy: Canadian Museum of Civilization."
- Map showing Dorset distribution. Canadian Museum of
Civilization. "Distribution
of Dorset Culture. The areas that were probably occupied by the Dorset
people are indicated on this map. Courtesy: Canadian Museum of Civilization
and the National Film Board of Canada."
- Old Bering Sea culture - hunting tools. Canadian Museum of
Civilization. "Old
Bering Sea Culture Hunting Equipment. These decorated ivory weapons are
from the Diomede Islands in Bering Strait and are approximately 2,000 years
old. The butterfly-shaped object may be a harpoon rest from the bow of an
umiak. Below it, from left to right, are a harpoon head; the handle of a
throwing stick, carved to fit the fingers; and two harpoon foreshaft
sockets. The elaborate decoration is reminiscent of the art styles of
eastern Asia. Courtesy: Canadian Museum of Civilization."
- The Great Migration. Source: Hyperhistory
Online, "Barbarian
Invasions."
- Extent of the Roman Empire. Student web site, "Roman Empire
ca. 300 AD."
updated 1 April 2002