Arctic Dreams, page 20
Climatic change—the advance and retreat of glacial ice in the Northern Hemisphere—is the hallmark of the Pleistocene, the epoch of man’s emergence.5 Vibe, keeping this in mind, and believing whatever he learned could be applied to understanding the climatic future of Europe and America, posed certain questions for himself. Why, he asked, were seals scarce at Ammassalik on the east coast of Greenland at the turn of the century, while at the same time they were plentiful along Greenland’s southwest coast? Why did the caribou population of western Greenland crash suddenly at the end of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? And what accounted for the periodic northward movements of Atlantic herring and cod in the North Atlantic?
Vibe scrutinized the records of the Royal Greenland Trading Company, which took in sealskins and fox skins, narwhal ivory, and other indicators, and by comparing these records with annual records of sea-ice movement and annual rainfall and snowfall, Vibe thought he could discern patterns. He checked his findings, to corroborate them further, by going over 232 years of fur-trading records from the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, and by examining records kept by wool growers in southwest Greenland.
The first pattern to emerge for Vibe was a cycle of sea-ice formation and movement that lasted about 150 years, which records from arctic ships of exploration seemed to support. Vibe regarded as a key insight in this early work the fact that fluctuations in the arctic climate that were responsible for shifts of land and sea animals north and south over prolonged periods were tied to a lunar cycle of 18.6 years (the time it takes the moon to intersect the earth’s orbit around the sun again at the same spot). Because the length of this lunar cycle is not a whole number, the maximum and minimum effect it has on the earth’s tides (and therefore on ice formation and weather) can occur at different seasons of the year, in successive 18.6-year periods. This led Vibe to posit a primary period of 698 years for the Arctic’s weather pattern, with secondary periods of 116.3 years, and what Vibe calls a basic “true ecological cycling period” of 11.6 years.
Depending upon your point of view, either Vibe’s insights are ingenious and his mathematics elegant, or his system is impossibly broad and complicated and of little help in understanding arctic change. His inquiry might be considered an entirely esoteric and rarefied pursuit, in fact, if it were not for two things. In the Arctic one is constantly aware of sharp oscillation. It is as familiar a pattern of human thought and animal movement to the arctic resident as the pattern of four seasons is to a dweller in the Temperate Zone. In spite of the many manifestations of this rhythm, and the effect of sharp oscillation not only on resident animals but, probably, too, on the cultures that matured in these regions, Vibe’s remains the only serious attempt at a description. Second, insofar as Vibe’s theories explain oscillation in temperate-zone climate patterns or indicate harbingers of another ice age, they have a significant bearing on our developing patterns of commerce and economics, especially in the Arctic.
It is easy to say that the Arctic is characterized by sharp oscillation, just as it is to say that the airs of a temperate-zone spring are felicitous, but it is difficult to say precisely why. The basal annual rhythm of the North is winter/summer. The weeks during breakup and freeze-up are short, frequently perilous times, when strategies employed by both animals and human hunters to secure food are momentarily disrupted. The long winter and short summer constitute a temporal pattern around which life carefully arranges itself. Preparations for winter show up clearly everywhere in the land. The short-tailed weasel grows its white coat and the collared lemming its long snow claws. Tundra rodents shift from their night-active summer pattern to a day-active winter pattern, with but a few days of irregular rhythm in between. The arctic fox lines lemmings up in neat rows in its winter caches.
A second pattern complements this oscillation—long stillnesses broken by sudden movement. The river you have been traveling over by dogsled every week for eight months, and have come to think of as a solid piece of the earth, you wake one day to find a heaving jumble of ice. The spring silence is broken by pistol reports of cracking on the river, and then the sound of breaking branches and the whining pop of a falling tree as the careening blocks of ice gouge the riverbanks. A related but far eerier phenomenon occurs in the coastal ice. Suddenly in the middle of winter and without warning a huge piece of sea ice surges hundreds of feet inland, like something alive. The Eskimo call it ivu.6 The silent arrival of caribou in an otherwise empty landscape is another example. The long wait at a seal hole for prey to surface. Waiting for a lead to close. The Eskimo have a word for this kind of long waiting, prepared for a sudden event: quinuituq. Deep patience.
As I moved through the Arctic I thought often about a rhythm indigenous to this land, not one imposed on it. The imposed view, however innocent, always obscures. The evidence that there is a different rhythm of life here seemed inescapably a part of the expression of the animals I encountered, though I cannot say precisely why. A coherent sense of the pervasiveness of such a rhythm is elusive.
The indigenous rhythm, or rhythms, of arctic life is important to discern for more than merely academic reasons. To understand why a region is different, to show an initial deference toward its mysteries, is to guard against a kind of provincialism that vitiates the imagination, that stifles the capacity to envision what is different.
Another reason to wonder which rhythms are innate, and what they might be, is related as well to the survival of the capacity to imagine beyond the familiar. We have long regarded animals as a kind of machinery, and the landscapes they move through as backdrops, as paintings. In recent years this antiquated view has begun to change. Animals are understood as mysterious, within the context of sophisticated Western learning that takes into account such things as biochemistry and genetics. They are changeable, not fixed, entities, predictable in their behavior only to a certain extent. The world of variables they are alert to is astonishingly complex, and their responses are sometimes highly sophisticated. The closer biologists look, the more the individual animal, like the individual human being, seems a reflection of that organization of energy that quantum mechanics predicts for the particles that compose an atom.
The animal’s environment, the background against which we see it, can be rendered as something like the animal itself—partly unchartable. And to try to understand the animal apart from its background, except as an imaginative exercise, is to risk the collapse of both. To be what they are they require each other.
Spatial perception and the nature of movement, the shape and direction something takes in time, are topics that have been cogently addressed by people like Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, and David Bohm, all writing about subatomic phenomena. I believe that similar thoughts, potentially as beautiful in their complexity, arise with a consideration of how animals move in their landscapes—the path of a raven directly up a valley, the meander of grazing caribou, the winter movements of a single bear over the sea ice. We hardly know what these movements are in response to; we choose the dimensions of space and the durations of time we think appropriate to describe them, but we have no assurance that these are relevant. To watch a gyrfalcon and a snowy owl pass each other in the same sky is to wonder how the life of the one affects the other. To sit on a hillside and watch the slow intermingling of two herds of muskoxen feeding in a sedge meadow and to try to discern the logic of it is to grapple with uncertainty. To watch a flock of snow geese roll off a headwind together is to wonder where one animal begins and another ends. Animals confound us not because they are deceptively simple but because they are finally inseparable from the complexities of life. It is precisely these subtleties of fact and conception that comprise particle physics, which passes for the natural philosophy of our age. Animals move more slowly than beta particles, and through a space bewildering larger than that encompassed by a cloud of electrons, but they urge us, if we allow them, toward a consideration of the same questions about the fundamental nature of life, about the relationships that bind forms of energy into recognizable patterns.
In trying to discover the route and the time of man’s arrival in the New World, science has had little to work with but bits of charcoal and an occasional broken tool or weapon retrieved from ancient fires and hunting sites. There is little disagreement about how man came to North America—people migrated across a broad, dry plain called Beringia from Asia during several different periods in the late Pleistocene. But evidence that would confirm man’s arrival at some time earlier than 35,000 years ago, or even 20,000 years ago, is in dispute. The certain evidence is that people have been living in North America for at least 14,000 years.
Assuming that man arrived in North America on foot instead of by boat, and gradually at that, he crossed from Asia either sometime before 35,000 years ago, when the Bering land bridge was open, or not until much later, about 25,000 to 23,000 years ago. (The Bering land bridge was present from about 25,000 years ago until about 11,000 years ago, but it was only during the period from 25,000 to 23,000 years ago that man could have both crossed from Asia and traveled south to the central plains of North America. After that the Wisconsin Ice Age climaxed; the eastern and western North American ice sheets met, closing off the way south and separating the American prairie from the Arctic. Western Alaska remained free of ice during this period, and no doubt people continued to live farther east in Beringia until Bering Sea rose with meltwater from the ice sheets, flooding the land bridge and separating Asia and North America.)
Many archaeologists believe man came to North America in two waves. The first (the one that might have crossed 25,000 to 23,000 years ago, or earlier) brought with it flaked stone and bone tools comparable to Neanderthal man’s Mousterian tools.7 The second wave came about 13,000 years later and brought with it a more advanced tool tradition, comparable to the Aurignacian tools of Cro-Magnon man.8 Both immigrant groups were big-game hunting cultures, subsisting on animals like large-horned bison, ground sloth, and woolly mammoth.
How the Arctic itself, the land east and north of the land bridge, became inhabited is unknown. The early hunting cultures in Alaska were succeeded about 5000 years ago by what some archaeologists regard as a less robust and impressive cultural tradition, one distinguished only by its very finely worked small tools. These microblade cultures were very likely the first human cultures to move into the North American Arctic.
Archaeologists know of two periods in the recent past when the climate warmed enough in the Arctic to allow human beings in skin boats easy summer passage through the islands of the Canadian Archipelago. These two “climatic optimums” occurred between about 3500 and 4500 years ago and again about 1100 to 900 years ago, and people migrated into the high Arctic on both occasions.
Louis Giddings, an archaeologist with a gift for locating important prehistoric sites, discovered cultural sequences at Onion Portage on the Kobuk River in Alaska and at Cape Krusenstern, Alaska, that provided basic chronologies for Arctic cultural phases. With Giddings’s findings and those of archaeologists working in northern Canada and in Greenland, it has become possible in recent years to organize a relatively coherent picture of early human occupation of the North American Arctic.
Before setting this forth, I should make two points. First, human beings migrating into this region were making a very bold move. Survival here required skills and technologies unknown to these hunters, not the least of which were qualities of a psychological nature. Second, the arctic migrations represent movements of very small numbers of people. It is not out of the question to consider that all the microblade sites archaeologists have discovered so far from western Canada to northern Greenland were created by fewer than 500 people. The Arctic offered man scant resources, which were widely scattered and sometimes difficult to retrieve. Even at the height of their success during the Thule cultural phase, about A.D. 1000, the number of arctic residents from Point Barrow to Peary Land may have been no more than 5000.
The first people to cross into North America were probably paleo-Indians, people who settled in the interior of Alaska and spread south. The geographical point of origin of paleo-Eskimos, people who remained in the Arctic, is unknown, but archaeologists generally favor the Bering Sea region and eastern Siberia. These arctic mongoloids may or may not have been the ancestors of modern Eskimos; in any case, paleo-Eskimos were in arctic Alaska by about 5000 years ago, having perhaps crossed the open water of Bering Strait in skin boats. It was their culture that was typified by minutely flaked chert and obsidian cutting tools about one inch long and one-quarter inch wide. This culture and its variations are referred to as the Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt).
ASTt campsites have been found as far east as Peary Land in northern Greenland (where the culture is called Independence I, after a site on Independence Fiord) and more or less continuously across the American and Canadian Arctic. Many of these sites appear to have been inhabited for only a single night or, at most, for a couple of weeks before the people moved on. These people hunted muskoxen, polar bear, arctic fox, arctic hare, and sea ducks, and the tools they left behind suggest theirs was a harsh and meager life. A Canadian archaeologist named Robert McGhee has written that ASTt peoples migrated into “the coldest, darkest and most barren regions ever inhabited by man.” He speculates that during the winters when they were hard-pressed for food, these people “may have almost hibernated in their unlit and unheated dwellings.” One looks today upon the remains of their dwellings—a fox-bone awl, a quartz arrowhead, the ring of stones that held down their skin tents—with profound respect.
With a gradual cooling, the Arctic Ocean ice front came farther south, and ASTt peoples apparently retreated. The next culture to make its presence known was another ASTt culture called Pre-Dorset, which appeared about 3500 years ago. This was a more communal, more technologically advanced people. They carved soapstone bowls in which they burned oil rendered from marine mammal blubber for heat and light, and they fashioned small wood sleds on which to pull their belongings. (Many Pre-Dorset campsites have been found at caribou river crossings and at fish-trapping locations that have been used by subsequent cultures well into modern times.)
Pre-Dorset peoples seem to have been concentrated in a core area around Foxe Basin, a region of land and sea mammal abundance. During periods when the climate ameliorated, they may have migrated out to other regions as well. The remnants of many different technologies have been uncovered at Pre-Dorset sites. (A technology is an assemblage of tools, utensils, weapons, and other implements designed for a specific task, such as the preparation of skins for clothing or caribou hunting.) The materials for construction and manufacture have included stone, bone, skin, ivory, antler, and, very rarely, wood. Some of the tools are highly specialized, designed, for example, for use in hunting a certain animal only in a specific season or under specific circumstances—to take a seal in open water or, alternately, at its winter aglu. About 2800 years ago, the Pre-Dorset sites gave way to evidence of a new culture called Dorset.
Many archaeologists speculate that the Dorset culture grew out of various elements of Pre-Dorset culture. Perhaps, too, there was an infusion of ideas and technologies from a contemporaneous culture in Greenland called Independence II; or from Alaskan cultures; or from archaic Indian cultures living to the south. However they arose, Dorset people seem to have appeared first in the Foxe Basin region of northern Canada. They had skin boats, small sleds, and better sea-hunting equipment than their forebears, and they built houses of snow.
Dorset carving is by far the most developed art in Eskimo prehistory. (The artwork of Okvik and Ipiutak culture in the Bering Sea area, contemporaneous with Dorset artwork, is comparable.) And most archaeologists agree that there is something unique about it. In contrast to other cultures, Dorset people decorated very few utilitarian objects, and single pieces of artwork, all carvings, are rather rare. The general feeling is that the carvings were connected with shamanistic magic, and many think there is something decidedly dark about them. These caribou antler, bone, and walrus ivory carvings are of single animals, most often polar bears; of human figures and human/animal figures; and of human faces in chaotic tableaux. The representations are both realistic and stylized, and most of the carvings are of inconspicuous size.
The eye for detail is so sharp and the execution so deft that you can readily tell a carving of a common loon from one of a red-throated loon. The style, writes Canadian artist and critic George Swinton, “exudes intensity and power … despite its remarkable subtlety and delicacy.” The human faces in some of the carvings that seem tortured and psychotic to some viewers, Swinton compares stylistically with German Expressionism, saying that their form “emphasizes content, vigour, and involvement (as opposed to style, elegance, and detachment).” The primitive quality in them, in other words, is more brutal than fetching.
Perhaps too much has been made of this Dorset “darkness”; but the observation that Dorset art is unsettling, while the art that preceded it and followed it is not, is common among archaeologists dealing with this period. Giddings describes the Dorset-like art of the Ipiutak to the west, in Alaska, as “grotesque and bizarre” and the Old Bering Sea culture art that followed as “balanced and pleasing, as though the artists led a secure—even serene—existence.” The circumstances under which these carvings are found sometimes augment feelings of apprehension. Froelich Rainey, excavating an Ipiutak burial site at Point Hope, Alaska, found a small carved caribou hoof protruding on a shaft from the pelvic region of a human skeleton. He cleared more dirt away to find that this long ivory shaft penetrated the entire vertebral column and emerged in the skull, where it curved forward into the space where the mouth would have been. It terminated in a miniature human hand, opened in supplication.
In July 1979, a young archaeologist working at a Dorset site in the high Arctic uncovered a caribou scapula that left him shaken. Both surfaces of this flat bone were incised with scores of small human faces with gaping mouths. He remembers sitting with the scapula in his hands on a cool and overcast morning and dumbly contemplating the agonized expressions. “I was frightened out of my wits by it,” he told me. Then he handed me his notes for that day and said, “Which is why the entry is so mundane.” He got up twice in the night to unpack the piece and look at it, he was so disturbed.
