Samantha Leigh Walker

The central problem of this proposed project is the development of a new narrative of the interior archaeological landscape of Amittuq, Nunavut, that is attentive to the locally and historically situated relations through which places and communities were mutually constituted during the Tuniit (Paleo-Inuit) period (2500 BCE-1350 CE). Arctic archaeologists have tended to frame Arctic landscapes as inert stages on which past peoples, conceived of as monolithic cultures, were repeatedly inscribed. This framing has perpetuated narrow interpretations of human social worlds, as it fails to consider the dynamic relations between people and places that are integral to how communities emerged in the deep past. By integrating local Inuit knowledge and oral history with a multiscalar archaeological investigation of inland settlement contexts in Amittuq, this research will build richer inferences of the Tuniit occupational landscape that attend to the varied and complex social lives of past peoples. In accounting for the active role of these archaeological places as community participants and holders of Inuit memory, the research will provide a conceptual and analytical framework through which future projects can continue to critically engage with the inseparability of past and present places in Inuit Nunangat (homeland).