Study shows indigenous Canadian Arctic people's textiles predated European contact
8/20/2018 10:00:00 PM
A new study by Brown University researchers shows that the Dorset and Thule people—ancestors of today's Inuit—created spun yarn some 500 to 1,000 years before Vikings arrived in North America. The finding, made possible in part by a new method for dating fiber artifacts contaminated with oil, is evidence of independent, homegrown indigenous fiber technology rather than a transfer of knowledge from Viking settlers.
The study was led by Michele Hayeur Smith, a research associate at Brown's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, who focused on artifacts from five Dorset and Thule archaeological sites in the eastern Canadian Arctic held in the Canadian Museum of History's collections. Co-authored with Kevin P. Smith, deputy director and chief curator of the Haffenreffer Museum, and Gørill Nilsen of the Arctic University of Norway, the research is changing the understanding of indigenous textile technology as well as the nature of the contact between Dorset and Thule peoples and the earliest European explorers of the eastern Canadian Arctic.
Read more at
https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2018/08/study-shows-indigenous-canadian-arctic.html#xxR3iD9ILRqCpxUl.99
