Culture is a moving target....
CULTURE IS A MOVING TARGET
The thing with culture, is that it is simply the accumulated activity of human beings at any particular point in time. And that activity, even in apparently stable societies, is a constantly shifting thing. Literally, it changes from moment to moment, and sometimes these changes are big and obvious and showy, and sometimes they’re subtle and imperceptible. But like a river, it always flows, always in motion. Defining or describing a culture is tricky, because the target is always moving.
In our culture, we’ve gone from a horsepower and steam engine economy to moon rockets, fossil fuels and high tech electronics in the space of a few generations. That's rapid transformation. Even a decade is now another world.
But even in the staid middle ages, we saw constant change. Carrots and onions spread through farms, changing diets, new diseases reduced the population, new technologies like horsecollars or stirrups changed lives, extended lifespans, increased food availability, altered wealth, caused cultures to rise and fall against each other. The world of a medieval peasant at his death was a very different place than the world at his death, though sometimes those differences might be hard to spot.
The Thule culture had spent two thousand years in Alaska, apparently slumbering. But that wasn’t really the case. It had evolved, slowly and incrementally, but it had evolved, gradually becoming something that would inevitably burst out and overwhelm the north. And that means it wasn’t static, something was going on, something was building up.
In OTL, the Thule culture would change and adapt as it expanded out of the north. The technique of ice fishing for seal, for instance, was not part of the original Thule package, but borrowed from the Dorset. That technique did not make its way back to Alaska. Other parts of the Thule package were abandoned as the Thule culture moved steadily eastward, being found redundant to new circumstances or requiring more time and skill than was useful iln the new lands.
Everywhere the Thule went, they found brand new landscapes, perhaps of the same sort as they had known, but every specific detail being different in every particular. Every hill, every rise, every inlet and bay, every lake was a different place, requiring adjustments and adaptations. Even in our time, Thule culture was a moving target, altering from day to day, year to year, century to century, changing and adjusting, in small or large ways to meet new landscapes.
The Thule culture of this timeline was already subtly different when it emerged from Alaska. In brand new landscapes, with new mixtures of resources, handicaps, opportunities and challenges, those differences would inevitably grow more pronounced.
The Thule package in this timeline had a few more arrows in its quiver - specifically, sweetvetch and claytonia as a valued part of diet, and a small cultural twist which saw humans helping to maintain and propagate the populations of these plants, which in turn allowed a recurring sustained natural harvest. This tiny cultural shift would have effects.
Population grew, in part because Sweetvetch allowed the hunter gatherer Thule culture to bypass the regular scarce periods in seasons, and in part because it increased the sum total of food available to the Thule.
With that, came subtle changes. Sweetvetch patches had to be identified in the summer, but had to be harvested during late fall and early spring. In the homelands, this mapscape had evolved naturally as part of traditional lifestyle.
But moving into new territories posed new challenges. Traditional knowledge was no longer sufficient, Sweetvetch patches had to be identified on the fly as groups moved through new landscapes, these patches had to be fixed in memory, locations marked with stones, judgements had to be made as to the maturity and likely harvest of patches, and conscious decisions had to be taken to revisit these areas in other seasons for harvesting.
Nor could this stabilize as traditional knowledge, accumulating small cultural shifts meant that sweetvetch patches were in flux, human propagation meant new patches. The mental mapscape had to become ever more complex in space and time, identifying existing patches, newly sewn patches, new potential planting patches, harvested patches, and patches in different states of maturity. And the complex mental mapscape had to shift continually, revised and updated with each season.
The result was within Thule society, the development of subtle intellectual tools and skills not quite paralleled in OTL, but which potentially formed a basis for further developments.
To assist in locating the plants, patches would be marked with stones, and eventually with patterns of stones. As sophistication grew, these stone arrangements would also serve as guides to the maturity of patches, with stones added from one year to the next until they were ready for harvest. Since it was often difficult to assess the age of a patch from the specimens growing there, the arrangements of stones became a kind of cumulative record. Uniformity of harvesting lead to uniformity of age of plants within a patch, which increased the value of uniform harvesting.
Distinguishing between edible and toxic varieties of Hedysarum, determining when particular patches or specimens were most harvestable, and finding and harvesting under difficult winter conditions of snowfall required further skill and knowledge. Knowledge accumulated, including noticing which other plants seemed to work well with sweetvetch, what conditions seemed most favourable, what conditions or plants seemed to discourage sweetvetch or be associated with poorer harvests.
One result was an accumulating cultural specialization. To some extent, hunter/gatherers had always had a degree of specialization. There will always be some people who are better hunters, some who are better toolmakers, etc. At the extreme ends of specialization were shamanic traditions, involving esoteric knowledge. The accumulating complexity of plant lore, and the spiritual components of ceremonial giving, tended to drive mastery of earth and plants towards the shamanic end.
This was a fairly gradual but not very straightforward process. Knowledge of plants, and particularly edible plants remained very widespread, though tied with spiritual practices, but increasingly higher and more specialized forms of knowledge became the property of a specialist class, shamans. This class in turn communicated with its members, accumulating and exchanging observations, and engaging in a constant low level experimentation that tended to produce an increasingly sophisticated practical/spiritual outlet.
As the shamanic tradition evolved, and as shamanic lore evolved, they became more and more adept at ensuring successful plantings in ‘virgin patches’. Human selection became more deliberate as Shaman’s intentionally began to recognize different expressed traits and began to value some traits over others, choosing and promoting specific plants for greater proliferation.
Active magical measures began to be taken to promote sweetvetch, including directing crude small scale communal labour efforts, including destroying bear root, uprooting punishing ‘bad magic’ weeds from patches, and crude landscaping such as digging small trenches or windbreaks or encouraging arctic willow.
At the same time, there were other factors at work. Population, as noted, had increased. This was a factor of both the increase in total food supply. But earlier and more critically, it had the effect of overcoming seasonal periods of scarcity that had limited population.
Hunter Gatherer cultures commonly have populations that are a fraction of the total potential food supply in their environment, commonly 20 to 30%. This was because of seasonal scarce periods, which tended to increase infant mortality and reduce birthrates. Hunter gatherer cultures were generally mobile and had little capacity to preserve and store food. But sweetvetch and other roots could be stored, lasted a long time, and could be harvested further in periods of scarcity. Even relatively small volumes of sweetvetch eased scarcity bottlenecks, and allowed a much larger carrying capacity. Hunter gatherer populations could sustainably double or triple or more, without too large an alteration to their lifestyle.
As the population increased, the amount of sweetvetch available increased even further, and additional root species, claytonia and roseroot began to be distributed widely, which meant that the hunter/gatherer societies populations could increase up to and even beyond theoretical maximums.
There were subtle lifestyle changes taking place as well, beyond simple increases in population density. Sweetvetch harvesting demanded compromises during harvesting season, you couldn’t be in a dramatically different area such as remote tundra or offshore. Harvesting requirements shaped travel routes. Where harvesting requirements were incompatible with critical hunting activities, such as caribou on the tundra or seal hunting offshore, then either one or another activity had to be foregone, or the clan or tribe had to split up to pursue both opportunities and reunite. This drove social complexity and increasing specialization.
Sweetvetch was a static harvestable. It didn’t move around, its location was fixed and predictable. In comparison, any kind of game tended to be mobile within an area. Confined to specific locations, there was a much greater emphasis on territoriality and possession. Rival groups were a threat. Patches needed to be guarded and patrolled. The territories held by a particular clan or group shrank, and with that shrinking came a diminishing opportunity for wild harvest and hunting, and an increasing reliance on sweetvetch and other roots as a key stable component of diets.
As resource areas became smaller, inequalities in the distribution of resources became more important. Some groups had access to seals and sealing, others had better access to caribou, access to different fish species, hunting animals, to raw materials such as flint, bone and driftwood began to diverge more and more strongly. Even the distribution of sweetvetch and other roots varied from clan to clan.
To address these inequalities raiding and organized warfare became commonplace. The amount of violence escalated with the population and with the diminishing of resource territories. Requirements for raiding and warfare lead to alliances and informal federations and coalitions. Within these voluntary exchanges allowed goods to move between communities, and eventually between federations and coalitions. Formalized systems of exchange on economic rather than ceremonial levels, often mediated by shamans and headmen, became widespread.
All of this was taking place throughout most of the new inuit territories on an evolving and unstable basis. Cultural shifts were feeding into one another. Populations were growing, becoming more territorial, less mobile, more reliant and more inclined to communal labour.
Essentially, Thule culture was building up towards a crisis, although crisis was not the right word. Thule culture, from several different directions, was slowly building towards a tipping point, a point of transformation. There were new and developing intellectual and abstract tools, new and evolving social roles, new forms of relating or interacting, communal labour, forms of exchange, greater and greater population densities, more and more confined territories, and an ever increasing accumulating sophistication with respect to these key plants.
When it finally took place, it would seem radical, but the underlying trends had been building for a long time, even centuries, percolating along under the surface of what might have seemed a very traditional way of life. These trends had gathered, fed each other, built up pressure, and eventually.... the world changes.
