A Brief History of the Circumpolar North - Aboriginal Peoples.
A Brief History of the Circumpolar North

The Peopling of the Circumpolar Region - Aboriginal People

Amanda Graham
Yukon College, Whitehorse, YT



Module 3| Main page | Introduction | Peopling of the North | Trade
Company, Church and State | Reaction and Resistance | Contemporary Situation

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Introduction
1. Extent of ice during the last Ice Age.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.

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The First Peoples in the "North"
2. Regions occupied by 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.3. Initial spread of the original peoples into the North.

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
4. Map of Central and Northern Asia showing the approximate locations of some of the earliest human-occupied sites. Source: Xerox PARC map with data from Derev'anko, Paleolithic of Siberia, 352.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
5. Six main forms of microliths.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.
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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.
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Several Explanations of the Peopling of the Americas
6. Beringia.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.

7. Possible routes to the peopling of North America.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.

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Developments Between 11,000-8500 BCE
8. North American areas mentioned in the text.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.

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Developments Between 8000-5000 BCE
9. Suomusjarvi quartz tools.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.

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Developments Between 5000-2000 BCE
10. Location of the Fertile Crescent.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.

11. Paleo-Eskimo dwelling reconstruction.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.

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Developments Between 2000-1000 BCE
12. Independence I microtools. Photo Canadian Museum of Civilization.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.

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Developments Between 1000-1 BCE
13. Map showing Dorset distribution.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

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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.

14. Old Bering Sea culture - hunting tools.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.

15. Extent of the Roman Empire.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.

16. The Great MigrationIn 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.

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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.

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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.

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Picture credits
  1. Ice Age cover, source unrecorded.
  2. Regions occupied by the first peoples in the North, Amanda Graham.
  3. Initial spread of peoples into the North, Amanda Graham.
  4. 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.
  5. Microliths. Source: Stone Age Reference Collection, Institute of Archaeology (I.A.K.K.) at the University of Oslo, Norway.
  6. Beringia. Base map, "Map of Beringia at the height of the last glaciation," from Yukon Beringia Centre web site. Additional colouring by Amanda Graham.
  7. 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.
  8. North American areas mentioned in the text, Amanda Graham.
  9. Suomusjarvi quartz tools. Source is "The prehistory of Finland," web page from The National Board of Antiquities, The National Museum of Finland.
  10. Location of the Fertile Crescent. There are many copies of this map on the Internet. I got this copy from a student web page.
  11. Paleo-Eskimo dwelling reconstruction. Canadian Museum of Civilization, "Lost Visions, Forgotten Dreams: The Paleo-Eskimos," web exhibition.
  12. 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."
  13. 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."
  14. 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."
  15. The Great Migration. Source: Hyperhistory Online, "Barbarian Invasions."
  16. Extent of the Roman Empire. Student web site, "Roman Empire ca. 300 AD."
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updated 1 April 2002