Speaker: Matthew Walls
Pikialasorsuaq, the North Water Polynya, is a highly productive marine environment extending between northernmost Greenland and Canada. Its open water, shifting ice margins, seabird colonies, and marine mammal populations have long made it central to Inughuit travel, hunting, and settlement.
This lecture will take the audience to archaeological sites across that landscape, drawing on research undertaken with Inughuit hunters, students, and community partners through Ilisimatusarfik, the University of Greenland. Exploration will focus on Kitsissut, a remote island group near the heart of the polynya, where repeated occupation extending back almost 4,500 years reveals sophisticated watercraft, navigation, and sustained maritime activity from the formative period of the modern polynya onward. Together with evidence for settlement, hunting, nutrient transfer, species relationships, and changing patterns of mobility, these discoveries show that archaeology can illuminate more than the human history of Pikialasorsuaq. It can also help reconstruct the deeper influence of Indigenous communities within the development of this unique environment through time. Amid rapid ecological and political change, the lecture makes a case for archaeology’s contribution to discussions about Arctic futures.