Sponsor
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs (OPP) Arctic Social Sciences under Grants ARC-0755725 and collaborative Grant ARC-1523160, ARC-1523205, ARC-1523059, and ARC-1523059. Field research was also supported by the Archaeology Commission of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Chaire Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University/CNRS awarded to Claire Alix, CNRS research unit Archéologie des Amériques (UMR 8096), and the AQC in the College of Natural Science & Mathematics at UAF.
Published In
American Antiquity
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-28-2025
Subjects
Alaska -- Bering Strait region, Inuit. Dendrochronology, Bayesian modeling, house contemporaneity
Abstract
The transformation of the Birnirk culture into the Thule culture is essential in reconstructing the emergence of modern Inuit across Alaska and the larger Bering Strait. To this end, two adjacent semi-subterranean houses of late Birnirk and early Thule affiliation, respectively, at the Rising Whale (KTZ-304) site at Cape Espenberg were recently excavated and dated by radiocarbon and tree-ring measurements. We present the Bayesian analysis of the resulting large series of dates, demonstrating the lack of contemporaneity between the two features: the Birnirk house was occupied in the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries AD, whereas the occupation of the Thule house occurred in the second half of the thirteenth into the early fourteenth century. With the increased precision made possible by coupling dendrochronology with radiocarbon, our results place the Birnirk-Thule transition more that 200 years later than the generally accepted date of AD 1000. A transition in the second half of the thirteenth century has major implications for the timing of Thule presence along the coast of Alaska and for their migration into the Alaska interior. It aligns with a thirteenth-century migration into the western Canadian Arctic and farther east and a brief early or “initial” Thule period.
Rights
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Society for American Archaeology. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync- sa/4.0), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is used to distribute the re-used or adapted article and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use.
DOI
10.1017/aaq.2025.21
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/44412
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Citation Details
Alix, C., Norman, L. E. Y., Krus, A. M., Taïeb, J., Anderson, S. L., O’Rourke, D. H., & Mason, O. K. (2025). The Birnirk to Thule Transition as Viewed from Radiocarbon and Tree-Ring Dating within Two Adjacent Houses at Cape Espenberg, Northwest Alaska. American Antiquity, 1–20.