Exciting discovery in Canadian Arctic.

For archaeologists and anthropologists, it’s an extremely exciting and rare find.

They have begun work on a rare site of driftwood houses used by the Inuvialuit people of the high Arctic hundreds of years ago.  In fact, the one being excavated this year is the first complete example of this type of structure found.

Max Friesen is leading the archaeological dig. He is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

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The houses are located in what might well have been the largest community of its type in the high Arctic.  The site is near present day Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories.

These cruciform houses were large, well-built structures using driftwood which floated down the Mackenzie river from the boreal forests farther south.

With a large central floor area, there were alcoves, or bench areas built on three sides, with an entrance tunnel on the fourth side, giving it it’s cruciform style.

Each house would have been home to two to four or more families

Professor Friesen says they would have been in use from approximately five hundred years ago until the early 1900’s and he speculates they were abandoned for possibly two reasons. The first may have been that the Mackenzie in that area may have silted up, pushing the beluga whales, a major food source, further away and the second may have been devastating epidemics that swept through the aboriginal communities in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.

He says these houses with their artefacts are important links as it was around this time that the Inuit were encountering Europeans for the first time and could reveal how that contact may have influenced behaviour and customs.

He also notes that the permafrost has kept the structures and artefacts in excellent preserved condition.

However, he notes that the warming and changing climate is now posing a serious threat to this and many other shoreline sites.

Higher water levels, less ice, more storms and melting permafrost are all combining to create severe shore erosion.

He notes that in some places the shoreline is being eroded back at a rate of 5 metres a year.

Professor Friesen is planning to continue work at the site in the next couple of years to complete the excavation in and around the sites before they are washed away.