About 1000 years ago the Thule people, the ancestors of the Inuit of today, inhabited the coastline of the Arctic Ocean. They pursued the giant animals armed only with harpoons tipped with heads of ivory. Later, when iron goods began to find their way into the Arctic from Greenland or Siberia, the hunters tipped the harpoon heads with metal, similar to the ones pictured here. Floats made of inflated sealskin were attached to the line and once the animal had been speared these were tossed overboard to slow its escape. Although the PreDorset (1700-800 B.C.) and Dorset (1000 B.C.-A.D. 1400) occupants of the Canadian Arctic hunted narwhal and beluga it was the Thule population which adopted the pursuit of the larger bowhead whale. The Thule people, and the Inuit after them, made use of different parts of the dead whale They ate the flesh and burned the oil in stone lamps as a source of light. The large, curved jaw and rib bones were used as rafters in the houses and other bones were shaped into tools.
After about A.D. 1200 the Arctic experienced a cooling trend in its climate. Sea ice increased in extent and whales probably disappeared from some regions because the water was no longer free enough of ice to allow them easy passage. The result was that when European and American whalers arrived in the North they found that some Inuit groups still hunted the bowhead while other groups pursued different game.
Courtesy: National Museum of Man, National Museums of Canada
