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NWT - In the near future Northerners interested in the early history of the Inuit before the arrival of Europeans will know a little more.

John Moody, a masters student in the University of Western Ontario’s archeology department, will be doing research on a 13th century Inuit community located near Paulatuk in the Pearce Point region.

William E. Taylor first excavated bones from the Tuliit homes located near Pearce Point, outside Paulatuk, in 1989. More than 20,000 bones were uncovered, some 9,000 of which John Moody will be conducting research on this year. - photo courtesy of The Canadian Museum of Civilization

The long-abandoned community called the Tiktalik site, dated from around 1250 A.D., consists of five semi-subterranean houses about three meters squared. It’s where Tuliit Inuit lived as they migrated across the Arctic. Tuliit Inuit came from the North slope of Alaska and reached Greenland at some point in 1200 A.D.

“It was a fast migration,” Moody said. “They’ve been linked to a marine subsistence and a lot of big whaling sites in the Arctic so that’s what they are known for.

“I’m looking at one of the houses and the animal bones that were found in it. I’m looking at hunting behaviors of the people who inhabited the one house.”

Ray Ruben, mayor of Paulatuk said he is happy to see research like this being done. He said he is interested in knowing more about the distant history of peoples in the North.

“It’s becoming news to us that people were in this area. It’s really exciting. It’s something the community wants to see.”

Ruben said they have seen an increase in applications for research in the region.

“People are starting to show a lot more interest,” he said.

Moody is conducting his research under the William E. Taylor Research Award, established by The Canadian Museum of Civilization to recognize and encourage excellence in human history research in the Canadian Arctic.

“I’m looking at hunting behaviors of the people who inhabited one of the houses,” Moody said, adding they’ll look at the bones discovered in 1989 by Taylor, the archeologist the aforementioned award is named after. “We count all the bones and we see which species people were going after more than others, whether they were ring seals or caribou or something like that.”

Counting the bones will be a painstaking task. Moody said they will have to go through about 9,000 bones collected, less than half of the total found – 20,000.

“It’s mostly ring seals but there are probably some other animals there, some caribou, other species of seal, and probably some fish,” he said.

The bones they’ve found lend insight into the Tuliit’s food sources at the time.

“It suggests they were focused on marine resources,” he said. “It’s assumed they were migrating at the time. They had boats and kayaks that were allowing (them) to move at high speeds across the Arctic. It’s thought this maritime adaptation helped them move quicker than if they had focused primarily on caribou.”

Moody hopes the research will shed more light on an already limited understanding of the Inuit before the arrival of Europeans.

“It’s in an area archeologists don’t know a lot about and it’s a time period we don’t know a lot about,” he said. “Their migration has been linked to climate change in the past so it’s going to be interesting to see if it indeed was climate change that was helping people migrate and if so what kind of adaptations they had to deal with moving into the future.”

He said making the link to climate change won’t be easy and will require a look into environmental reconstructions on past climate change in the region. He hopes the findings will help give some Northerners insight into their history.

“I think that having ties to the landscape and the land, and I hope it’ll be interesting to the people who want to know where they came from and how they got there.”