The Northern world, AD 900-1400 /

These 17 innovative papers, many from a session at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in 2004, focus on 500 years of rapid cultural transformations throughout the North American Arctic that included two great migrations: the Alaskan Inuit colonization of Canada and Greenland and the Norse colonization of Iceland and Greenland. The first chapter discussing climate and landscape changes in the Arctic is followed by four themed sections: Social Change in the Western Arctic; The First Thule; The Last Dorset and Regional Interactions; Population Movement and the Clash of Cultures. The authors are leading Arctic scholars who bring the most recent archaeological and climate data to their reinterpretations of this dynamic period of cultural and climate change in the Arctic. They present new data and interpretations on old problems, such as that the re-dated Thule Inuit spread across the Arctic rules out the old theory that it was the reduction of sea ice during the Medieval Warm Period that caused the migration; that the eastern Dorset did not die out before the arrival of the Thule Inuit; and that Norse contact and trade was more pervasive than previously thought. A must for anyone seriously interested in the Arctic and the Inuit. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. B. Richardson III emeritus, University of Pittsburgh