Lands of Ice and Mice: An Alternate History of the Thule

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Another option, if we are looking at verminators, are ferrets. Ferrets were also used similarly to cats in Europe at the time, and I'm fairly certain that there are ferret species that are indigenous to the arctic/ sub-arctic.
 
Yes, the ferret species indigenous to the Arctic would be the Short Tailed Weasel, aka the Ermine, aka the Stoat. Were you thinking of something else?

The black footed Ferret ranged as far north as the Sub-Arctic, as did the Weasel, Mink, Marten, Fisher and other close relatives of the Mustelid line
 
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Yes, the ferret species indigenous to the Arctic would be the Short Tailed Weasel, aka the Ermine, aka the Stoat. Were you thinking of something else?

The black footed Ferret ranged as far north as the Sub-Arctic, as did the Weasel, Mink, Marten, Fisher and other close relatives of the Mustelid line

Well, I was wondering about the likelihood of one of these being domesticated or semi-domesticated as verminators. There is a precedent for this in ancient Europe, in which mustelids were used instead of cats until the Roman Empire absorbed Egypt.
 
My impression of these things is that quite often, a culture tends to dance with the girls that brung them. If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

To clarify, my thinking is that once a culture has established a relationship with a domesticate or semi-domesticate, they'll stick with it, even at economic or political cost.

Take the Guineau Pig. Used as a food animal, microlivestock in the Andes. In Africa, the Guineau Pig has been imported and is in wide use as a microlivestock food animal.

But what about Europeans - Spanish, British, French, Portugese, Latin Americans and North Americans. The Guineau pig hasn't been so widely adopted, certainly you can't go to grocery stores and buy them the way you can chicken. I think in part this is because chicken are taking up the economic and political space in the cultural marketplace.

We, our culture, is used to chicken. We spend a great deal of time and money on chicken, and we invest heavily, both economically and socially in chicken. So we don't embrace guinea pig. Even avian rivals, Turkey and Waterfowl have a very tough time of it.

Looking at the Norse, the Norse invested incredibly heavily in cattle, extending their range far beyond its natural range, through use of barns and barn engineering, hay gathering and pasture clearing.

Cultures do adopt new domesticates, particularly if some other culture does the work of domesticating them. Pre-Domesticated animals, specifically already domesticated animals are easier to import. Basically, it takes time and effort to domesticate an animal, its a major social investment.

So if you have a domesticate already, why make the additional investment to domesticate a new one? The economics are against you. More investment in the existing animal pays off easier in the short and medium term, than does investing in creating a new domesticate.

That's why it is so much easier for cultures to acquire their new domesticates ready made. Have some other culture go through the labour of domestication or semi-domestication. Once that is done, well, you don't have to make that big initial investment, its been made for you, so you just take advantage of it.

But even domesticated, there's usually special skills in terms of managing the animal - growing it, feeding it, harvesting, protecting it from the elements, managing or controlling its behaviour, that have to be learned and transferred.

Now, if you look, you'll notice I've guilded my animal domestication lilly considerably. I started with Caribou. And Caribou could well have been the only domesticate. But having established Caribou, I posited a rival subculture of hunter-gatherers under considerable stress which didn't have Caribou but which had Musk Ox. Ptarmigan were a 'flash of genius.' Arctic Hare were vermin, which were inspired directly by Ptarmigan. The suite of semi-domesticates were animals inherent in and through the full Thule range which met a desperate need.

Once the suite of semi-domesticates is established and stabilized, its going to be hard to add to. European cats have a good chance of adding to the mix in some areas - pre-domesticated, in the right niche. Ferrets, are wild, might have a lot harder time.

Look at it from the Ferrets viewpoint. There's a lot of competition already, there's also humans around all over the place. There are a lot of ferret killers - humans, dogs, fox and owl. Most animals avoid humans and avoid predators.

I'm not saying we won't see Ferrets being added as a semi-domesticate in southern parts of the Thule range. But it will be slow, particularly slow at first, and will require in part, Ferrets becoming habituated to human presence.

The Thule go out of their way to discourage dogs from preying on the semi-domesticates, going so far as 'poisoning lessons.' This somewhat reduces the dangers to Semi-domesticates, the two apex killers - humans and dogs, tend to leave them alone. They won't initially do this for Ferrets.

And the categorization of ferrets may remain Vermin, particularly if they pose dangers to Ptarmigan and Arctic Hare. It's a trade off for the Thule. They already have to invest time and effort to protect their microlivestock from the existing semi-domesticates.

If Ferrets pose an increased risk to microlivestock, will they want to make that investment. Will there be enough additional vole and lemming killed to make up the for the loss of ptarmigan and hare. This is the same economic test that Cats will have to face for access to Thule society.

It might be worthwhile to be cautious. If Ferret are found to prefer Ptarmigan to Voles, we may have a problem. There's a long history of predators being introduced to snack on particular animals where we discover that they do far more damage to other animals.

On the other hand, always remember that culture is a moving target.

Even if semi-domesticated ferrets or weasels are not useful for Voles, there's rats. It's likely that European contact will see the slow introduction of Rats to the Thule. That's a vermin that may require more robust semi-domestics. So Ferrets and Weasels may become more widely adopted.
 
Traders of the North Pole

Elllesmere Island is the tenth largest island in the world at 75,567 square miles. Over 500 miles long, north to south, and three hundred miles widest, east to west, it’s northern tip is the most northerly point of the Canadian Archipelago, only 478 miles from the North Pole. Only the northern tip of Greenland, comes closer, at 440 miles to the North pole.

Ellesmere differs from many islands of the Canadian archipelago in being quite mountainous. It is the northernmost part of the Arctic Corderilla, a mountain range which includes the eastern half of Baffin Island and the northern part of Labrador. The mountains are no great shakes. The two tallest mountains on Ellesmere are 8,600 and 8,200 feet respectively.

But the mountains and hills which shape Ellesmere’s geography lead to a complex dynamic. Their height and northerly latitude lead to extensive glaciation, including mountain glaciation. This in turn lead to seasonal run off and stable mountain rivers, which fed lakes. Lake Hazen is the largest Arctic lake in North America. Unlike many of the western Arctic Islands, which see so little rain or snow that they can technically be called deserts, Ellesmere is awash with water.

The mountain and hill slopes of Ellesmere meant that sunlight was an extremely variable commodity. Southern facing slopes received far more sunlight than northern facing slopes. The steeper the southern facing slopes, the more concentrated the sunlight. Shallow valleys, depending on their orientation, produced warm oasis in the middle of lifeless stone and gravel deserts, or sterile wastelands. Walking a few hundred yards could take you from landscapes that were like the surface of Mars, to blinding glacial sheets, to conventional arctic tundra, to wetland marshes occupied by migrating geese. Despite its extreme northern location, Ellesmere’s geography meant that it was a land of microclimates, filled with oasis far richer and more biologically productive than they had any right to be.

In the summer, of course. In the winter, it pretty much sucked, the whole thing being basically snow and ice.

Biologically, Ellesmere was the home of Musk Ox and Caribou. It’s inuit name was ‘Land of Musk Ox.’ It hosted migratory birds and supported wetlands. Species of bee demonstrated that it hosted a profusion of small flowering arctic plants. The lakes, frozen over ten months of the year, still supported fish like Arctic char.

Between Ellesmere and Greenland is the Nares Strait, a narrow water passage where the current flows strongly from north to south, roughly 25 miles wide at its narrowest point, and approximately 400 miles long, the strait amounts to a long interface point, traversible in winter when frozen solid, during summer awash with bergs and breaking ice. Arctic cultures have moved directly from Ellesmere, across the Nares strait into Greenland, the Thule culture being only the most recent.

The north of Greenland is ice free, and contiguous with relatively ice free eastern shores extending hundreds of miles inland. So overland, the natural direction of travel in Greenland is north along the top and then down the Eastern shores. On the west side, after the Nares Strait, the waters open up to Baffin Bay, and a stretch of several hundred miles where the glaciers approach the shores closely or actually march to the sea. Barely habitable, if habitable at all, a southern ocean current takes travellers past the glaciers to more hospitable shores further south. Thus, emigrants from Ellesmere would tend to pour down both sides of Greenland.

Off and on, Ellesmere was occupied by arctic cultures for some four or five thousand years, which in turn occupied Greenland. During cold spells, of course, it was a fairly lethal environment. But during the most recent medieval warm period, it was occupied by both the Dorset culture, and then the Thule. The medieval warm period brought enough warmth and enough energy to Ellesmere’s cold shores that water flowed freely, the glaciers retreated, and life flourished, supporting human habitation.

In this timeline, things went a little differently. The Thule in their hunter gatherer phase reached Ellesmere, at least fifty to a hundred years earlier and in greater population, displacing the Dorset culture even more decisively, and moving to Greenland. If anything, these Thule were more aggressive than the OTL Thule.

Agriculture, from the Baffin Island complex, came to Ellesmere even as the medieval warm period was giving its last gasps. Temperatures were notably lower across the Ellesmere, and while the Oasis remained warm, the productivity of much of the Tundra declined. The extremes of the landscape increased, and the Thule depended ever more strongly on the fertile natural microclimates. In this context, the Ellesmere Thule adopted agriculture rapidly and developed it with a desperate intensity.

It was probably on the slopes of Ellesmere that the peculiar ‘feng shui’ of Thule Agriculture developed most strongly, with careful attention being paid to orientation and pitch of slopes. An island of natural microclimates, landscape engineering built on the lessons of nature, extending growing seasons. Throughout the Thule range, microclimate engineering paid dividends. But in Ellesmere, a land made for microclimates, engineering could pay off hugely. Ellesmere works were the most sophisticated and ambitious in the Thule world. The Ellesmere Thule even added a new cultivar to the Thule basket in the form of Dwarf Fireweed. As climate cooled, agriculture spread and intensified, leaping easily to Greenland.

In OTL the Little Ice Age eventually drove even the hardy Thule from the Ellesmere and the northern reaches of Greenland, isolating the Greenland Thule from most contact with the rest of the Thule culture.

Here, however, things proceeded differently. This Ellesmere was much more heavily populated, its works ambitious, its people resilient. The Ellesmere subculture was perhaps the most technically sophisticated in the Thule range. But even this was hardly a defense against the Little Ice Age. Winters lengthened, conditions worsened, temperatures dropped. Productive microclimates deteriorated, producing smaller crops, taking longer to do so, or losing the ability to sustain human crops.

The Ellesmere Thule adapted as best they could. Increasing desperation made their engineering ever more sophisticated. They looked for ways to use water or air currents to transfer heat from steep slopes, to preserve and pond water, to accelerate summer melting and slow winter freezing, to enhance microclimates any way they could. More cold tolerant varieties of sweetvetch and bistort, claytonia and roseroot emerged, smaller, slower growing, but still hanging on. Agriculture shifted from the usual three year Thule cycle to a four year cycle, but it held on. Dwarf Fireweed replaced Fireweed. Fernweed was introduced to marginal areas. Ptarmigan and Hare were imported. Microclimates that could no longer sustain human agriculture were given over to Musk Ox and Caribou herding, and microclimate engineering devoted itself to preserving and extending the sustenance of their animals. Where agriculture was no longer sustainable, they shifted intensely to herding or fishing, refining techniques and technologies. Groups traded or warred for lands, for resources, for opportunity.

Despite all these efforts, Ellesmere simply could not sustain the population that had developed. The result was outmigration. Groups of the Ellesmere Thule fled. They fled to Greenland, moving down both east and west slopes, moving south until their hardy brand of Agriculture could flourish, displacing their kin as savagely as their kin had displaced the Dorset. They fled south to Baffin and the other Islands, and from there to the mainlands.

The Southern Thule also fled from the Little Ice Age, a population movement that spelled disaster for the Dene and Cree populations to the south of them as the Thule pushed into their territory.

But the Thule of the far north region of Ellesmere had nowhere to go but to other Thule territories, into lands that, Greenland aside, were as sophisticated and even more densely populated than they were. The Ellesmere Thule might overwhelm the Thule of Greenland and come as conquerers. But on Baffin Island and the mainland, they came as refugees.

But they were sophisticated refugees. They were the most talented microclimate engineers the Thule had produced. Moving into populated areas already under stress, the Ellesmere Thule could not find a ready welcome anywhere. It was hard to concentrate. Instead, they were forced to disperse widely, some of them reaching as far as Alaska, carrying the intellectual skills and abilities with them.

Ellesmere had not been abandoned however. Agriculture continued, crops were produced, microlivestock raised and livestock herded. The population dropped but did not vanish. Ellesmere society hung on. The result was occasional reversals of population movement. The refugee Ellesmere Thule still had relatives and clans back in the homeland, they still had at least the prospect of support and kinship networks there. Often they had lands or herds there, fields that they could claim as birthright, shares of resources. Although they Ellesmere Thule had valuable skills and expertise that allowed many to make their way in the south, they weren’t welcome. So during the intermittent warm spells, many would head home.

Intermittent fluctuations in climate moved people back and forth. Ellesmere’s population pulsed, its members sometimes spreading south through the Thule world, and then returning. Not everyone returned of course, many found homes, or niches. The Ellesmere diaspora became a network, a pulsing, living, network of people moving back and forth, connecting up with each other. And through this network trade items began to move. Not just a specialty trade of ceremonial or small portable high value items, but a more ambitious economic trading network which moved goods of all sorts, ranging from flint, to bone, sinew and fur, agricultural surpluses, man-made artifacts and products, both objects of cultural innovation, and the skills of innovation, tools, metal, plants and animals.

Much of this trade moved through and between Thule lands. Ellesmere itself had relatively little to offer in trade. It’s principal benefit came from being the home land of various clans and tribes which were traders, some small share of that wealth inevitably funneled home. And so it went, for the period roughly stretching from 1300 to 1400 CE.

But something interesting was in the works. Despite the Little Ice Age, the new Thule in Greenland, the Agricultural Thule had held on in the north, maintaining contact with their brethren as they moved south, and maintaining intermittent contact with Ellesmere. Far more tenuous and fragmentary, the Ellesmere diaspora into Greenland also sustained an intermittent network back to the homeland. In the south of Greenland, something very interesting was waiting to be discovered.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Is it April 1st already? Boy, 2012 is just flying by...

Bruce

PS - I'm looking forward to Thule/European "first contact"...
 
I am, I am so tempted to send this careening off into a Thule/Smurf timeline. I know it would be a very bad thing. But I am awesomely tempted. Maybe sometime I'll do a Smurf timeline or something.

But, I'll be good.

Actually, having taken us right up to the edge of Viking Contact, I think I'll be naughty and step away from that, and spend some time exploring the interraction of the Thule Agricultural revolution and the end of the Medieval Warm Period/Beginning of the Little Ice Age in other directions.

One very interesting area will be the examination of the Thule expansion into Siberia, and the wars with peoples like the Yakut and the Chuckchi for control of the Siberian pacific and Arctic coasts.

And of course, there will be more discussion of the impact of the Little Ice Age on Thule Heartlands, the attendant disruptions, and the expansion into Cree and Dene territory.

And for those of you who can't live without incredibly long and detailed discussions of actually existing plants or animals which are incorporated into this ATL Thule Agricultural complex, there's a few more.

Actually though, that well is just about mined, thank god. Basically, there are no more Draft Labour domesticates, three is just nuts already. There's no more microlivestock. And there's no more semi-domesticate verminators. The three founder root crops have been described. Most of the secondary crops are described.

What's left? Dwarf Fireweed, from Ellesmere. Labrador Tea, from Labrador. A trio of Alaskan domesticates - Brook Saxifrage, Sourdock and Wild Rhubarb.

I might do something on Aquaculture and fishing, though I'd have to research more intensely to see what the prospects are for arctic fresh and saltwater fisheries are like. There's no kind of agenda there. I'll jump onto that any old time, or I might never get to it.

And probably an examination of Seals, Walrus and Bowhead whales, which will be pseudo-domesticates. Actually, not domesticates in the sense of Caribou, Dogs or Ptarmigan. Not even semi-domesticates in the sense of Foxes and Owls. Sort of a level below that, call them 'managed species', and probably not much managed at all in many cases.

I'm deeply, deeply tempted to incorporate the Stellar's Sea Cow into Thule culture as a shoreline domesticate. I have some ideas there, but I'm not sure if its really viable. It would be so cool if it was.

I do have to apologize for the extreme length and detail of many of these posts once again. The trouble is that an Arctic Agricultural complex is such a patently counterintuitive impossible thing that I really feel that I have to work hard to make the case. It's such an impossible thing, that its necessary to go into extreme detail and say -

Yes, Sweetvetch actually exists and these are its OTL qualities, and this is why! And Claytonia, and Fireweed, and Bistort! And here's actual temperature readings from the Ground at Ellesmere, and why microclimate engineering will work, and what windbreaks can do! And this is what packs Dogs and Caribou can carry!

It's not like I can just go 'Oh hey, the meso-americans domesticate the stinky pig as a microlivestock!' and go from there. (No disrespect to the Stinky Pig or Two Small Animals timelines, I loved that stuff. Basically, I'm a big fan of civilization builders, Jared, General Finlay, 9FangedHummingbird, the lot of them)

Anyway, beyond that, I want to work out the metallurgical subcultures of the Thule (yes, plural), and I want to develop the Norse Interchange which should be fun.

All of which means that actual contact with modern Europeans from the 17th century on is going to take a while to come about.

And I note I haven't paid too much attention to Thule society overall. Some random thoughts. They're probably not terribly PC, not Tsalal scale evil or anything, but roughly what you'd expect from a neolithic culture making its big break.

We've seen the emergence of some of the subcultures - the competing Reindeer and Musk Ox herding subcultures on the western islands where lack of water makes agriculture infeasible. The Ellesmere subculture has diverged. Beyond that, there are allusions to Baffin Island, Alaska, and the McKenzie delta as subcultures, power centers. We've seen Ellesmere people form the basis of large scale trading networks, and the Shamanic tradition emerging. It occurs to me that the Thule may well be on their way to the sort of linguistic and cultural centrifugalism that we saw in OTL Inuit, or in pre-medieval Europe.

As a random thought, the larger territory needed for Thule agriculture probably makes dominating urban centres or city states less probable. Way too much landscape is needed. So probably, what we'll see are smaller localized cities and towns.

The result is probably coalitions and confederations rather than centralized Empires. Thule may well form states, but they may generally avoid the 'Robber Baron Empire' model - ie, a powerful central state rules over and loots a vast hinterland which has no positive stake in the Empire and lots of resentment (which is probably a recipe for regular collapse, once the peons and oppressed all find someone to rise up behind).

Thinking out loud, the closest parallel I can think of to the situation of the Thule might be Europe and its organization of warlike invading tribes into agricultural landholders through a feudal system.

Will the Thule evolve something analogous to Euro-feudalism as a social organizing principle? Possible, although the presence of a universal Shamanic class, the not-yet-discussed sea economy, and the comparatively lower population density/greater required farming territory will probably make it quite different. The 18th century Thule Empires might be a lot closer to the Holy Roman Empire or Charlemagne's Empire in structure.
 
Is it April 1st already? Boy, 2012 is just flying by...

Bruce

PS - I'm looking forward to Thule/European "first contact"...


Hey Bruce! Love your stuff! Everyone leave this timeline and go look at Bruce's stuff! Come back eventually though. Don't stay gone.
 

The Sandman

Banned
If it helps, consider the Stellar's Sea Cow as your allowed "one-in-a-billion chance of happening, but it's cool enough that I'll make this TL that one-in-a-billion" element. :)
 
Aha, now I, disciple of the Ice Arab theory, feel like we are really getting somewhere.

Not that I despise all the painstaking infrastructure that has been laid down thus far! We'd never be able to understand or believe how a civilization could make its home north of the Arctic Circle like this without it.

But now we are at last getting into the macrostructure, some sense of just what sort of high-level culture builds on this substrate.

Of all the places to center the progressive element of Thule, I'd never have guessed at Ellesmere Island. Now that you say it though it makes sense; first as a favored oasis during the warm period, now as a relic of those glory days reinventing itself to hang on--by sprawling out, not as mighty conquerors but clever traders.

I guess there is some justice in saying that the Ellesmerians (hmm, that's Umingmak Nuna in Inuit, but I don't know how to form the proper adjectival noun or whatever it is to refer to the people from there in Inuit, anyway it would apparently translate as "Musk Ox people" anyhow! But "Ellesmerian" is a sucky word (at first glance anyway, it might grow on one) and anachronistic too--) Ok, these Umingmak people might not be generally welcome among other Thule; I guess that tends to the be the fate of trading peoples, they rarely get actively loved however vital the services they perform, indeed the more essential their trade is the more likely they are to be resented for it!

Still, I'd think they'd form some allies somewhere, maybe some colonies where gradually their influence is more and more accepted as normal and integral to the local culture.

It seems obvious enough that there is going to generally be a hate-love relationship between them and Inuit powers established on a strong regional basis; the "nation" that acts on the resentment and scapegoating natural to subject outlander traders to to massacre or expel them would tend to be one that, other things being equal, slips behind their rivals that stretch tolerance and a certain grudging acceptance, and thus get the benefit of the trade they bring. It could well be of course that these relationships are always seesawing back and forth; one generation hosts them and grows stronger, then in their strength purges them out and starts slipping relative to rivals--but slowly, it might not be obvious that cultivating these relationships fosters strength and breaking them leads to downfall, so they might find few secure ports of call anywhere; the map of their trade routes shifting from decade to decade, punctuated by wars and massacres.

The opening post by DirtyCommie of the coronation at Great Slave Lake city rather implies that (anyway if we assume this big shot did in fact hold sway even unto Umingmak Nuna) it was the big land powers that established the center of gravity of the realm. Stuck as I tend to be in Classical analogs that may lead me badly astray, I'm thinking the big land power is like Persia, with people like the Umingmak and the Alaskans I still imagine as peripheral feisty Greek-like peoples.

If that dynasty didn't hold sway of some kind over Umingmak Nuna and its diaspora, I'd think the Europeans would be much less interested in treating with him; that they have to go so far inland, so far south to the bounds of Thulian advantage, suggests though that the trading peoples, as vital as they may be to the success of the whole society complex, are not the big shots.

The story of Thulian contact and co-evolution with the European challenge may be one of the fall of these big land-based territorial powers and the renaissance of the far northerners in general and peoples like those of Umingmak Nuna in particular. The big land empires and realms are just the sort of terrain the Europeans have half a chance to operate in, especially if they can appropriate the Thulian crop system to themselves, either by learning it and applying it themselves or by enserfing the Thulians (or taking over their old serfs; it seems likely that that far south they aren't always killing off the Dene and so forth, but in some cases lording over them instead). Move north though and the advantage goes more and more to the home team; if the northerners were always peripheral and recently under the dominion of the southern landlords, they might not resent whatever power smashes them, might even be in on the kill as allies; infused more with the trading Umingmakites, they might be the sorts of partners many European powers would have been looking for.

The broken Southern Thule might be rather bitter toward these traitors, as they'd see them of course!
 
It seems obvious enough that there is going to generally be a hate-love relationship between them and Inuit powers established on a strong regional basis; the "nation" that acts on the resentment and scapegoating natural to subject outlander traders to to massacre or expel them would tend to be one that, other things being equal, slips behind their rivals that stretch tolerance and a certain grudging acceptance, and thus get the benefit of the trade they bring. It could well be of course that these relationships are always seesawing back and forth; one generation hosts them and grows stronger, then in their strength purges them out and starts slipping relative to rivals--but slowly, it might not be obvious that cultivating these relationships fosters strength and breaking them leads to downfall, so they might find few secure ports of call anywhere; the map of their trade routes shifting from decade to decade, punctuated by wars and massacres.

I could see a strongly insular religious and cultural identity develop among the Ellesmere Thule. In a way, the Thule of Ellesmere Island might end up as a sort of "Jews-on-Ice".
 
I could see a strongly insular religious and cultural identity develop among the Ellesmere Thule. In a way, the Thule of Ellesmere Island might end up as a sort of "Jews-on-Ice".

Even as I was writing that, I could see elements of that emerging. It's not an exact analogy though. Possibly a closer one would be the Chinese diaspora, where Chinese immigrants emerged as the merchant and trading class in many southeast asian societies, in part because they were excluded from the landholding/agricultural sectors, and in part because their kinships and relationships with other Chinese beyond the local communities gave them certain advantages in importing and exporting trade goods.

The difference though is that the Ellesmere Island core remains much more intact. It's as if the Jewish kingdom of Jerusalem remained after the diaspora. And much more integrated with the network, as if the Chinese state remained influential over the Chinese diaspora. Hmmm, maybe they're kind of like Scots.

The Ellesmere develop a very distinct cultural identity among the other Thule, simply through the politics of exclusion. Interestingly, the stay at home Ellesmere develop a distinct cultural identity on their home island, if only because of their relative poverty and dependence and harsher conditions. The stay at home Ellesmere and the trading Ellesmere are close enough though, that when a major trading opportunity emerges they'll be able to take advantage of it.

That opportunity, of course will be the Norse Interchange.
 
I could see a strongly insular religious and cultural identity develop among the Ellesmere Thule. In a way, the Thule of Ellesmere Island might end up as a sort of "Jews-on-Ice".

But the identity of Jews in the medieval world was shaped in a big way by their losing their own special homeland; so far there's no hint that anyone has the ambition or animus to break their home society or invade it.

I have a bad feeling that Ellesmere itself may do very badly during early European contact, precisely because they'd have perhaps better affinity for the European venturers, and because they are the emporium, and because geographically they are proximate to the routes seekers of the Northwest passage might take; all this conspires to make them the focus of the early ventures and thus the focal point of European diseases, which would also tend to funnel in toward them from other contacts.

Well, that might solve their perennial overpopulation problem:eek:; a false solution of course because then they'd fall below the population levels needed to sustain all their elaborate efforts, meaning their hard-won oasis starts to come unraveled (and Ellesmere loses the cachet of wizardly levels of skill) leading to a vicious spiral of failure.

Meanwhile people fleeing the plagues would tend to spread them, which would add another layer of resentment on the reputation of the diaspora. Which, with the homeland blighted, is now a Diaspora indeed!

So, not so much Jews in the Classical Thule period, but perhaps becoming more like that after European contact and the ruin of Ellesmere itself.
 
Yes, Sweetvetch actually exists and these are its OTL qualities, and this is why! And Claytonia, and Fireweed, and Bistort! And here's actual temperature readings from the Ground at Ellesmere, and why microclimate engineering will work,
I've loved learning about this stuff.

It brings up a question, has anyone tried growing any of these now in OTL? People in the arctic still need to eat, and developing some of the natives plants should cut down on some of the imports needed.
 
I've loved learning about this stuff.

It brings up a question, has anyone tried growing any of these now in OTL? People in the arctic still need to eat, and developing some of the natives plants should cut down on some of the imports needed.

Sweetvetch and Fireweed are cultivated and used for habitat restoration. There are programs under way in a few countries to cultivate or domesticate Roseroot because of its herbal/medicinal values.

The problem is that with our mechanized western agricultural system, intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides, monoculture production methods, farm subsidies, high degree of processing, and well developed infrastructure for distribution and marketing, its simply cheaper, much cheaper, to ship pizza pops to the north pole than to develop indigenous crops.

For the last couple of decades, we've been helping to destroy Haiti's society by selling them rice more cheaply than they can actually grow it themselves. The result has been the collapse of agricultural and village economies all over the Haitian countryside, and the flight of displaced people to the capital. If that's happened to a developed agricultural system, there's no way an indigenous arctc agricultural experiment could stand a chance to develop.

Plus, of course, most of these plants never formed a significant part of Inuit diets, so the intensive consumption and usage would be pretty foreign, and the activities required pretty alien. So it never took root.

Interestingly, a lot of the missionary and trading posts in the Arctic would try to develop their own gardens, so we do have a consistent log of experiments in that regard. Those efforts, however, were not focused on the indigenous plants, but rather on efforts to grow the familiar crops. The literature suggests that things like carrots, onions, potatoes and even barley were grown in the arctic, but often with mixed results. The usual was that it would grow, but fail to thrive. Barley, for instance would grow, but fail to produce seed and wouldn't spread. Because of prolongued summer sunlight, things like lettuce or cabbage would grow well.

Looking at what I could find of the literature, I'm almost certain that the more successful missionary or trading post efforts were taking place in inadvertent microclimates. Post's gardens were usually grown quite close to the missionary or traders building or buildings or their personal home. Most of the time they'd be building out of the wind as much as possible, so there might be natural windbreaks in the area. Alternatively, the buildings themselves could be windbreaks.

I also suspect that the soils were slightly enriched in the vicinity, simply through human activity - wind born ash, garbage dumping, etc. (We see areas of enriched soil/higher production around fox dens, through similar inadvertent activities).

And honestly, many of these trading posts tended to plant in regularly visited 'oasis' in the Arctic desert, so the whole place was often something of a microclimate. Apart from planting toward the sun, which is a common enough trick for hardcore gardeners, I suspect that most traders or missionaries didn't really have enough understanding or intuition to grasp the nature and role of microclimates, or to realize the importance of the inadvertent microclimates some of them were working within.

The efforts weren't systematic. It was just sometimes whoever was there would do it as a side hobby when they had time to kill. Their replacements might not bother. There was no effort at systematic observation, cross referencing or really studying the matter, the people doing it didn't have either biological or geophysical knowledge or insight, and the plants used were entirely foreign and annual crops. And since the Inuit were barely making use of plants in their diet, it wasn't like the missionaries or traders in most cases could be pointed to the right plants to try.

So in OTL, what you get is an interesting series of data points or case studies which never amounted to much.

On reflection, it is possible that by way of some fluke or another, the right hobbyists in the right place in Labrador or Alaska might have started trying to cultivate Claytonia and Sweetvetch, or Roseroot and Sweetvetch, and gotten somewhere, and who knows where that might have lead.

Alternately, even if the Inuit tended to ignore these plants (the ones that actually grew in their areas - some of them like Claytonia had a very limited north american range), the Siberian peoples, particularly the Chuckchi were avid harvesters of Bistort and Claytonia, and often stored quantities for the winter. I could see agricultural pilot projects around these and similar plants, particularly during the communist era. But if those took place, the results haven't floated to the surface over here.

Beyond that - there's been a long history of Reindeer domestication, and intriguing work on Musk Ox domestication. There's nothing on ptarmigan or arctic hare domestication, but we do have the examples of chicken and rabbit. Generally speaking, microlivestock is a huge unexplored area that has been barely tapped in OTL and may have potential to affect a lot of lives. I've posted links on potential microlivestocks.
 
But the identity of Jews in the medieval world was shaped ....

An interesting and intriguing post, thank you.

because then they'd fall below the population levels needed to sustain all their elaborate efforts, meaning their hard-won oasis starts to come unraveled (and Ellesmere loses the cachet of wizardly levels of skill) leading to a vicious spiral of failure.

Not so sure about that. A large part of Thule Agriculture is the engineering of microclimates through earthworks - mounds for windbreaks and drift catchers, irrigation and drainage trenches, etc. Once that's built up, it doesn't require much effort to maintain. That's why Thule Agriculture is cumulative and keeps expanding generation after generation.

Abandon the network of mounds and trenches for a decade, or even a couple of decades, and it will still be there when you get back. It might take a century or so for erosional processes to start breaking it down. Perhaps longer.

You'll even see most of the plants you were cultivating still reproducing there. It's hard for arctic plants to propagate, thats why so many of them grow vegetatively, and tend to cluster in matts and clumps. You would get 'weed' species working their way in, but it would probably be relatively slow. Basically, the most likely candidate to invade sweetvetch or claytonia fields would be Fireweed and other air-born seeds.

You'd lose productivity definitely. Agricultural practices like smudging or trampling the snow to make it melt sooner in the spring, or fertilizers would come to an end. So there would be some degradation.

But overall, the infrastructure would remain there to be reoccupied as the Thule recovered from a population collapse.

The only real danger I see is the prospect of Europeans attempting to colonize abandoned Thule fields and instituting temperate country agricultural techniques and crops - that could turn into a disaster, wrecking the mound system, plowing under stone cover, not recognizing perrenial agriculture and harvesting out crops, wrecking the soil, and trying to grow western crops. I think we might see a pattern of settler colonies starting up, thriving for a short time, and then imploding.
 
I've actually thought a great deal about the possibility of seals as semi-domesticates.

What makes it interesting is how quickly baby seals put on weight. As an extreme example, a hooded seal pup only nurses for four days, and doubles in size during this period. No other animal can compete with this, although of course only having a single offspring per year means the overall reproductive rate is low.

As I see it, the best bet for the Thule would be to relocate some seals to freshwater lakes within their territory. This would probably remove any threat to the seals from polar bears, and certainly stop orcas from eating them.

The lakes would not have enough food to house large seal populations, so offal might be provided to the seals as a supplement. With the decreased mortality for the pups, some could easily be culled on an annual basis.
 
A general issue with early European contact (not with the Norse, but the later cycle) is that European Christendom, during the Reformation/Counterreformation conflict) was obsessed with "witchcraft" as a, um, "burning" issue. The rulers took it much more seriously than in the Middle Ages actually; King James was very concerned about it. Well, the shaman-based worldview of the Thule is an open and shut case of pagan witchcraft by any straightforward Bible thumper's view; all their painstakingly accumulated knowledge of how to make crops and domesticates work in the Arctic is framed in pagan religious terms. The more sophisticated and empirically clever this corpus is, the more it will look like Renaissance/Early Modern sorcery.

A possibility exists that savant-minded European explorers will be keen, in the interest of making allies among the Thule and appropriating their methods for themselves, to show that either it isn't witchcraft at all but legitimate science expressed in benightedly pagan language, or that actually the Thule religion isn't Satanic. But rivalries will surely then use the weapon of "these people are consorting with the Devil!" tactically and strategically.

A pretty brouhaha.

Again, the presence of all those European envoys at the coronation scene suggests some sort of trucial accommodation, broadly accepted by a diversity of confessions represented by the diversity of nations, had been reached. Since it looks like the new emperor chose to ally with Catholic powers, it may be in sequel that the Protestants, anyway the Anglicans, may turn back to the "Satan rules the Arctic!" theory. And of course it will make sense to anti-Papist Anglicans of both high and low church persuasions that the Pope would consort with witches.
 
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