Eskimo Archaeology: Professor Gregory Reinhardt on Excavations in Alaska
Eskimo archaeology exists “quite literally on the fringes” according to Gregory Reinhardt, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Indianapolis and a leading authority in the field.
His studies have on numerous occasions since 1979 taken him to the far flung, frozen northern reaches of Alaska and other parts of the Arctic. The Eskimo arrived in the the region around 4,000 years ago, and spread out right across northern Canada and Alaska, evolving into a complex network of culturally distinctive geographical groups. Much of their material culture remains frozen, wonderfully intact, in the arctic permafrost.
It’s a fascinating subject, and one that’s well worthy of further investigation. Eskimo Architecture: Dwelling and Structure in the Early Historic Period, co-written by Reinhardt and cultural anthropologist Molly Lee, is a good introduction – a meticulously researched, written and illustrated book that in 2004 was named one of the “Best of the Best from the University Presses”.
Reinhardt gave Heritage Key an insight into the history, highlights and many unique challenges of studying this hardy ancient culture that once called the icy fringes of the Arctic Circle home.
HK: How did you first become interested in Eskimo archaeology, and what was your first experience of fieldwork in the arctic?
GR: I was an undergraduate and I had just taken a course on Eskimos. My professor towards the end of the quarter mentioned – because I kept coming round his office asking more questions about the topic – of a job opening in Alaska. It didn’t pan out, but I heard of another similar job opening. I applied and I got it, so I went to the arctic.
It was my second time in Alaska – my first was when I was still in the armed forces and I flew into Anchorage once. So I went to a site that is about eight miles from the Arctic Ocean, technically a part of the ocean known as the Beaufort Sea, and about 15 miles from Canada. It’s in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is abbreviated as ANWR, which is an area which for years Republican administrations have wanted to drill and Democratic administrations have said “no, we should leave it alone.”
HK: Who exactly were the Eskimo?
GR: They traditionally lived around the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They are two linguistically similar groups of people. The northern Eskimos are called Inuit. In Canada, they have only Inuit speakers. In Alaska, however, there are Yupik. Yupik and Inuit are about as different from each other, according to one linguistic anthropologist, as the difference between English and German. They’re not really mutually intelligible languages.
HK: So when you’re studying the Eskimo, you’re studying two quite distinct cultures then?
GR: Yes. Basically Eskimos ranged from Greenland across Labrador and the rest of Canada, across the Arctic coast of Alaska, to the Bering Strait and Bering Sea coasts, and then they sort of skip over the Alaska peninsula, and you find groups of Eskimo called the Pacific Gulf Eskimos, but more specifically they’re called the Koniag; and the Prince William Sound Eskimos, they called themselves Alutiiq. The Alutiiq speak a dialect of Yupik, and all the people around the Bering Sea area speak Yupik. At the north end of the Bering Sea, that’s where you start to see the Iñupiaq language of the Inuits spoken.
HK: How old is Eskimo archaeology?
GR: It started in the early 20th century, realistically, in any serious way. Probably in the 1920s, but more into the 1930s and beyond.
HK: And it’s very much on the fringes of archaeology as a science?
GR: It’s quite literally on the fringes! In a nutshell, we know that there was one migration about 1,000 years ago, when the people who are the Inuit speakers left Alaska and headed eastwards, and so the territory from North Alaska all the way over to Greenland is unprecedented as an area so far as one language spoken – you know, the geographic distance across there. Eskimos arrived in the arctic roughly 4,000 years ago.
We have a few older cultures – one that really fascinates me is called the Arctic small tool tradition. Small tools, based on lithics. They produced a lot of tiny blades; they would fit into the side of harpoon heads especially. They’d use these blades for harpoon heads or for little cutting jobs and sometimes arrow heads.
HK: You found some very important human remains in the early 1980s, while investigating at a site near Barrow in Alaska. Tell us about that.
GR: We were in Barrow – we being the Utqiagvik Archeology Project, from the State University of New York Binghamton. SUNY Binghamton won this project in 1982 to excavate in Barrow, because in the town they were putting in an underground utility system and they were going to be digging up different parts of the town. Barrow is near the northernmost part of Alaska, Point Barrow – it’s about 71 degrees north. Our project was to excavate where the utility lines were going to go, before those spots got destroyed by commercial development.
A couple of local men were digging in the bluff, which is a common past time there. They came upon a body, but what happened was they hacked up the body and brought its head to our laboratory. Then in the course of that day, they chopped through that body and they chopped through a second one, and they exposed part of a third one. Then the directors of the project, at the request of the civic government there, excavated the remains of a third body. Then that was put in cold storage.
It was like the body of the iceman (Ötzi the Iceman) – still intact, desiccated, but still perfectly preserved. The guys who hacked through the first two bodies – I don’t know what they were thinking, it was very odd.
Three weeks later, some other people were rooting around in the same spot, and exposed another human. They also dug enough around the same area to realise that some of the wood that was sticking up was wall planks for a house. So after about a week of negotiations, we were allowed to remove the remaining bodies – there were three more. And we excavated the house.
HK: What did you discover when you excavated the house?
GR: We had in this house most of the artefacts that are normally missing from an Eskimo dwelling. The other houses that we excavated in Barrow had a few artefacts in them but not a whole lot, because [Eskimos] took their household goods with them when they moved out in the summer. This one was different because the people died in their house – the house collapsed on them.
We think there was something called an ivu – we describe it as an ice override. It means the ice from the sea creeps inland, because of wind and sea currents. If you get enough pressure near the coast, sheets of ice will ride up the bluff. That’s the simplest explanation for what happened, and it just collapsed the house.
X-rays done on two or three of the bodies suggested they had things like broken ribs and pierced heart and lung membranes, and a child from the house had broken teeth. Two remains that were complete were autopsied indicated those kind of issues. And they were both in fetal positions. It was a pretty dismal end.
We found at least two little caches of artefacts and in a large cavity below the floor we found clothing, harpoon parts, a bundle of feathers – wing feathers that might have been used for fletching arrows, or for a broom. It was a treasure trove! It was nothing like King Tuts’ tomb, but in the context of a single household we got a fantastic glimpse into how Eskimos live.
HK: You must have to endure some tough conditions when conducting fieldwork in the Arctic. Do you ever wish you’d studied the ancient Egyptians so you could get some sun once in a while?
GR: No! I just don’t get as cold as most people. Eskimos' extremities are much better vesseled – they have much better circulation. I have to wear gloves, but normally I can get away with one or two layers of clothes less than my crew members do.
It is cold there. The average temperature in the summer is about 42 degrees for a daily high, and it can get up towards 60 and maybe higher – that feels like T-shirt weather!
But it is cold there! We all wear rain pants, waterproof pants. The average temperature in the summer is about 42 degrees for a daily high, and it can get up towards 60 and maybe higher – that feels like T-shirt weather! It can get up into the upper 20s sometimes at night, so a little bit below freezing.
At the house that had the frozen bodies, some days it would be totally foggy, because we were right next to the ocean. There was fog, and occasionally rain and sometimes snow. So it was really wet – everything would get wet, your notes, your hands. One time I was working with two other guys, we were rotating shifts so we could chop through some solid ice. All of us a couple of days later had really achy hands because of the cold.
HK: There must be some major logistical challenges to overcome when conducting fieldwork in remote spots in the Arctic?
GR: Yeah, there are a lot of logistics. You just can’t get to most sites easily. When I worked at a site down the coast from Barrow from 1994 to 1996, all of our stuff had to come down by plane. They’d land on the beach, and all of the planes would have larger tires called tundra tires, which were much more bouncy and forgiving. So we had all of our deliveries that way. The cost of course was astronomical.
HK: Is it hard to get funding for Eskimo research, since it’s not the most fashionable of archeological subject areas?
GR: It can be. In the far north there haven’t been that many large-scale projects. I had one from 1994-1996, it was funded by the National Science Foundation, through my school as well as Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. It was probably the last of the big ones there. 1982 was the previous large one before that. And there was smaller scale one in the mid to late 70s. It’s not so much the difficulty of getting funding as what it is you’re going to do – if it has enough merit to be worth support by granting agencies.
HK: Are there any Eskimo sites that you can recommend that people might be able to visit?
GR: Point Hope, you can get there by plane but you usually have to fly into Barrow, then fly on a smaller aircraft to get to the site. Point Hope is where, 1500 years ago, there was culture called the Ipiutak. They were an amazing group – it was probably one of the largest prehistoric villages ever. It was excavated right after World War II by Froelich Rainey. It was amazing; it was a prehistoric village I think of more than a couple of hundred houses, with astounding ivory carving – intricate masks made out of pieces of ivory linked together.
But you’re not going to see much there – that’s the problem with a lot of these sites. There isn’t much left of a snow house, right? It melts away. If you go to Anchorage, they have a heritage centre, and in the heritage centre they have some different designs of Eskimo houses.
HK: What advice would you give to anyone who – like you when you were a student – was particularly interested in Eskimo archaeology, and wanted to find out more about it? What’s a good starting point?
GR: My advice is to read widely about past and present New World Arctic peoples and understand that the vast territory across which they spread means that different groups adapted along different lines. Most lived on the coasts, but some lived inland or up rivers. You could also look in depth at National Geographic magazines, for instance, to track the changes in Eskimo lives over the past century.
The paramount source about Eskimos is The Handbook of North American Indians: Volume 5, Arctic and is unsurpassed in covering the entire Eskimo world during traditional times and in prehistory. For Eskimo traditional cultures I’d have students read The Eskimos by Ernest S. Burch, Jr., a good overview of cultural themes, with lots of excellent artefact photos, and Eskimo Architecture by Molly Lee and me, a book that shows how much diversity existed in their summer and winter dwellings, with many illustrations of people and their homes in the old days.
HK: In a very general sense, what is it that you find most fascinating about Eskimo archaeology – what has driven you to devote so much to it over the years?
GR: What makes Eskimo archeology so fascinating to me is that I can look at artefacts, whole or fragmentary, and generally know their function, because their technology got perfected early and didn’t need to change much thereafter.
Naturally, digging above the Arctic Circle means that most things end up in permafrost, which is another bonus: the presevation is near-perfect.
The challenge, however, is that sometimes it feels like too much gets preserved, causing us to process far more than archeologists would have to deal with in most other parts of the world.
Finally, the cultures there intrigue me – there’s so much similarity in some ways, yet each geographic group has its own distinct cultural idioms. Also rewarding is that the people I’ve met are generous with their time and resources and typically anxious to learn about their own past.
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