New research is upending old assumptions about what the ancestors of today’s Inuit learned from Viking settlers.
Techniques researchers have developed show that ancient Dorset and Thule people knew how to spin yarn centuries before the Norse were thought to have taught them, changing the way archeologists think about Arctic history.
“There’s a lot we don’t know,” said Michele Hayeur Smith of Brown University in Rhode Island, lead author of a recent paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Hayeur Smith and her colleagues were looking at scraps of yarn, perhaps used to hang amulets or decorate clothing, from ancient sites on Baffin Island and the Ungava Peninsula.
The idea that you would have to learn to spin something from another
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