Mackenzie Inuit Lithic Raw Material Procurement in the Lower Mackenzie Valley: The Importance of Social Factors

Abstract

Oral and written historical records indicate that the Mackenzie Inuit traveled up the Mackenzie River from the Arctic Coast to procure lithic raw material in the interior from a quarry at the mouth of the Thunder River, which is known locally by the Gwich'in of the lower Mackenzie Valley as Vihtr'ii Tshik. We evaluate this proposition using non-destructive polarized energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence to compare the geochemical signatures of the lithic raw material from Vihtr'ii Tshik (MiTi-1) and flakes and tools from the Mackenzie Inuit village of Kuukpak (NiTs-1), which is located more than 400 km downriver of the quarry source. The concentrations of nine selected elements-three major elements expressed as oxides (SiO 2 , Fe 2 O 3 T, and K 2 O) and six trace elements expressed as metals (Rb, Sr, Y, Zr, Ba, and Ce)-are compared using descriptive statistics, spider diagrams, and principal components analysis. The geochemical effects of chemical weathering on the surfaces of artifacts are evaluated by measuring element concentrations before and after removal of the weathering rind from select artifacts. The results of our analyses demonstrate that the lithic raw material available at Vihtr'ii Tshik is best characterized as chert, and that 86% of the flakes and tools from Kuukpak analyzed in this study are chemically similar to the raw material from Vihtr'ii Tshik. Historical records and archaeological data indicate that the people of Kuukpak traversed a complex social landscape to obtain stone from Vihtr'ii Tshik through direct procurement.

Power, security, and exchange: Impacts of a Late Holocene volcanic eruption in Subarctic North America

“…Political and economic desires did not bridge the geographic gap or linguistic barrier of Dene and Inuit-Yupik people, at least not for prolonged periods required for formal kinship and corridors of economic exchange to develop (Dumond, 1980;Janes, 1973;Morrison, 1991;Ousley, 1995;Rasic, 2016;Szathmary, 1979). Dene and Inuit interactions vacillated from warfare to relative peace and this seemed to limit the transfer of language, DNA, and technology (Birket- Smith, 1930:33;Hearne, 1795:338;Heine et al, 2007;Janes, 1973;Lamb, 1970: 208;MacKay et al, 2013).…”

“…For example, spear points typically associated with the Early Holocene elsewhere in North America were used in the Subarctic to European contact (Gordon, 1996;Hearne, 1795:35;Morrison, 1984Morrison, , 1987. The Subarctic has also received little academic attention, which, when combined with poor preservation and shallow stratigraphy, has produced a meager body of dated tools or items of adornment to inform studies of social dimensions (Holly, 2013(Holly, , 2019MacKay et al, 2013). Lithic provenance (linking stone artifacts from archaeological sites to their geological origins) is one of the few avenues to reconstruct Subarctic human relations: we summarize studies in N.W.T.…”

Identification of Macrofossils within Stone Tools: a possibility for tracing the source of artifacts?

“…Methods such as petrographic analysis (Fenton and Ives 1984;Kristensen et al 2016aKristensen et al , 2016b, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) (ten Bruggencate et al 2016;MacKay et al 2013), and instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) (Kendall and Macdonald 2015) require the destruction or alteration of artifacts. In amorphous cryptocrystalline silicates, such as chert or flint, research has been conducted into microfossils within the matrix of the artifacts to distinguish chert varieties (Biittner and Jamieson 2008).…”