Thinking about things

A few years ago Edmund Leach (1973), in commenting on a symposium devoted to the 4 'newer approaches to archaeology, pointed out that changes in the paradigms of archaeological interpretation appeared to follow those of ethnology, but with a time-lag of several decades. Having recently rejected the naive historicism and evolutionism which characterized 19th century ethnology, the new archaeological paradigm is closely related to the naive functionalism characteristic of ethnology during the first half of the 20th century. In this paradigm, cultures are seen as primarily economic systems interacting in various predictable ways with their envrironments. The structuralist paradigm favoured by Leach, in which cultures are seen as primarily communications systems and which has produced much of the more interesting ethnological work of the past 20 years, has yet to make an impact on archaeology. In large part, this is a result of the simple fact that functional attributes of archaeological artifacts are more easily recognized than are symbolic attributes. However it may also be due, in part, to the blindness to other interpretive modes which Thomas Kuhn has attributed to the users of any scientific paradigm. That the functionalist bias of archaeological thinking may indeed be obscuring the existence of certain symbolic attributes of prehistoric technologies, is suggested by a chance observation on the archaeological remains of the Thule culture of arctic Canada. The Thule culture, a concept formulated by Mathiassen (1927), and one which has changed remarkably little over the half century since its original definition, comprises a distinctive set of archaeological materials found in northern Alaska, and across the arctic mainland and islands of Canada to Greenland and Labrador. The Thule people are thought to have originated in northern Alaska, where they or their ancestors had developed an extremely efficient maritime-oriented adaptation. About A.D. 1000 they began to spread eastward across the North American Arctic, expanding to become the primary population of the area north of the tree-line. Although Thule groups adapted their ways of life to local environments, most retained an orientation to the coast and an economy based on the hunting of sea mammals including the large baleen whales. After approximately A.D. 1600 the uniform cast of the Thule culture becomes less apparent, as adaptations changed and diverged in apparent response to regional variations in a general climatic deterioration and environmental change. The Thule way of life continued virtually unchanged to the Historic period in Labrador and southwestern Greenland, while elsewhere it was transformed to the patterns characteristic of the historic Inuit. The Thule people are considered to have been Eskimos, almost certainly speaking dialects of the Inupik Eskimo language, and to have been directly ancestral to the present Inuit populations of arctic Canada and Greenland.

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