The Thule Civilization

Around 1000 CE, a people named after Thule—the ultimate land known to the Ancients—invaded almost all of Amerindian Arctic. Whale and seal hunters, builders of stone and bone houses, the Thule people replaced the Dorset culture and became the direct ancestors of modern Inuit.

The Thule culture takes its name from a site in northwestern Greenland where archaeologists identified, in the 1920s, a previously poorly understood civilization. It emerged around 1000 CE in northern Alaska, then spread rapidly eastward: Arctic Canada, Greenland, perhaps as far as Labrador.

The Thule people mastered techniques that their Dorset predecessors did not use or no longer used: large sealskin boats, toggle-head harpoons, composite bows, semi-subterranean winter houses built with stone, whale bone, and turf. Their economy relied on hunting cetaceans and marine mammals, supplemented by fishing and land hunting.

This expansion coincided with the Medieval Warm Period, which opened maritime routes and facilitated coastal navigation. In Greenland, they coexisted with Norse colonists without anyone knowing exactly how far their exchanges or conflicts went. To travel in winter, they perfected the qamutiik: a sled with wooden or bone runners, flexible and without wheels, pulled by dogs. In summer, it was the kayak or umiaq; in winter, the qamutiik transported family, tents, meat, and tools over hundreds of kilometers without roads or horses.

Later, the Little Ice Age hardened living conditions and fragmented their networks. Current Arctic populations—Canadian Inuit, Greenlandic Kalaallit, Alaskan Inupiat—descend largely from this culture. Thule is not here a Greek legend: it is the name of a forgotten polar power, rediscovered under ice and turf.