Here's a couple of questions for the group mind.
(1) I'm tending to see the emergence of Agriculture in the Thule as a 'tipping point' kind of thing. Pseudo-agricultural practices, increasing population and a more rigorous approach to territoriality combine to tip over into an actual agricultural complex around 1100-1200 which spreads through the Thule culture as a rolling wave.
So, here's the question. How do the loose organizations of agricultural communities transform to larger polities? Chiefdoms, federations, states? Are they implicit in the underlying society? Are they simply a development of increasing population? Do they arise from internal tensions, or cultural tensions between adjacent populations?
Assuming that the Thule agricultural complex emerges around 1200 with population expanding, what's the next steps in social development? At what point, do we get self appointed kings or kingdoms and empires ruling over territory? What's the mechanism?
First of all, someone who knows a lot more than I ever did about actual Inuit culture would be far better equipped to answer these sorts of questions!
My impression is that the Inuit of OTL would be categorized as Gatherer-Hunters, albeit very sophisticated ones with very specialized skills and tools. In turn I have a sort of schematic in my mind of what a GH society is like and how it differs from agricultural or pastoral societies.
1) the definition I'm using for a GH society is one whose primary economic activity is harvesting existing, wild plants and animals. Even in environments far more lush than the Arctic, this implies very low population densities, an upper limit on the size of even the biggest bands of around 300 or so and an ideal band size more like a third that; these bands then migrate within a territory they and their neighbors tacitly recognize as being "theirs"--but at any one time they are physically occupying only a small portion of the whole of the range they assume they have access to. So their communities are best described as "camps" rather than towns; during the course of a year they will move to other campsites many times, depleting the most easily gathered food resources, then moving on to another site.
The basic economics of their situation implies certain ethics. One, very little in the way of material goods, whether food stocks or tools or other items, can be taken with them in their cyclic migrations around their range. They can't rely much on stored items or big investments in fixed pieces of equipment. Another aspect of this limit is that pretty much everyone in the band can make just about any item of their technological kit themselves. Being used to being limited to rather few and small items of equipment, being able to make this limited kit work because there are few of them in an environment they know how to find food to live off of in, no one is in a position to dominate anyone else by virtue of specialized knowledge or control of access to critical resources. Thus, what social stratification there is is by gender first of all, and then by age. But there is no ruling elite class.
Indeed even in much kinder environments than the Arctic, cooperation is the key to success. The anthropological materials I've read indicate that there is something of a conflict among men in values between the concept of individual worth and prowess, exemplified by success in hunting, versus cooperation with schemes to improve the productivity of all the men more than even the best could achieve on his own by cooperative hunting strategies. There's talk in Colin Turnbull's work for instance of the community applying escalating sanctions against individuals whose egotism is deemed to be disruptive, from disapproving talk to some shunning to in principle, exiling the troublemaker from the band--a sentence usually rescinded when the point has been made since permanent exile would amount to a death sentence. However one has to wonder why exactly a man would risk these sanctions and suppose that countervailing, and interacting dynamically with the overt value of cooperation, there is some recognition that competitiveness in moderation is a valuable thing.
Interestingly Turnbull describes among the Ituri rainforest Mbuti "pygmies" a social mechanism whereby the youth of the band will go and find some sacred instruments secreted by them in the forest, and act out an attack on the camp something like an elephant coming in and raging around. They are said to do this when the band is wracked with controversy beyond a certain point; the punishment falls on the whole camp indiscriminately and tends to mark an end to an era of particular gripes and bickering. The picture I got reading Turnbull on the Mbuti (which seemed to be borne out by reports on other gatherer-hunters, the !Kung "Bushmen" of the Kalahari of Botswana and Namibia, living in a much harsher environment) was of a society that achieves remarkable balance of power and status between all members, even the various age groups having complimentary countervailing powers available to them that tends to underscore mutual respect. Children are cared for; the youth apparently empowered to enforce overall political/social climate, the surviving elders respected for their knowledge acquired over many generations, and the adult-age people are of course the primary producers whom a more straightforward sort of society might simply put in charge of everything.
Because there is no leverage to be gained by attempting to monopolize anything, and because few material goods can be kept, the basic economic mode of a GH band seems to be sharing. Someone makes an extra tool, they will simply let someone else use it; the only "bankable" commodity is goodwill!
Now someone who knows more than I do about the Inuit of our timeline will have to tell me whether these characteristics encompass or contrast with their particular ways. But this is the sort of society I imagine they have had. There would be among them no war chiefs, no paramount rulers; little in the way of religious bigotry, no keeping of slaves.
I believe GH societies go generally support shamans, but the way one becomes a shaman, according to a class in Native American Spirituality I once audited, is "A spirt power makes you an offer you can't refuse!" That is, one is stricken down with some sort of malady or episode, in the course of which, in the shamanic mindset anyway, one is touched by this or that guiding power; one emerges from the coma or trance with special new knowledge and occupies a rather uncomfortable role thereafter, since people fear that a shaman might use their power against them and would rather avoid being involved with one and risking their displeasure.
So the point here is, a shaman is not much like a typical chief or lord or even a priest-caste like the Hindu Brahamins. Who becomes one is apparently random rather than the result of anyone's social strategy. The economic and cultural role they play is significant since esoteric knowledge is passed on through them.
---now if the Arctic is "greened," I believe this would indeed change Inuit society. Again someone who actually knows the Inuit would be a better help in envisioning just how!
We have a disagreement going on about the timescale of divergence from OTL. I believe it would be best if certain divergences that take a long time to develop "in the background," "on the back burner" as it were. Meaning among other things that various items of their technical and eventually, agricultural, kit are being slowly honed and in a minor, auxiliary role are also pretty widespread in the Arctic already.
The dramatic POD then would be for the northern Canadian Inuits to cross a threshold that for the first time tips an Inuit society decisively away from being able to fall back on pure gathering/hunting in a pinch. Then they'd cross the line to some kind of post-GH-sort of society and economy.
I haven't said much about relations between bands. My impression is that a set of bands that have been neighbors for some time will have worked out relations with each other; they respect each other's ranges, and there is contact in the form of occasional meetings which can involve intermarriages thus exchanges of people. But the tendency is for each group to pretty much ignore each other, provided these tacit agreements are being respected.
My impression is that a stranger appearing to a band is not immediately attacked, but there is wary negotiation of contact; if the stranger or strangers appear to be reasonably civil and have something to offer they can be guested. I believe there is evidence of remarkably extensive trade in material items over remarkably long distances, which analysis implies would not have been a simple matter of exchanges from band to band but suggests that there were people who traveled long distances, crossing many band ranges, to carry items directly from sources to peoples rather far away from these.
However relations are not always good; the anthropology I've been taught says that when a band's experience with particular strangers is that they are dangerous intruders, their response is to treat them as dangerous animals and hunt them. There is not the pattern of behavior that we associate with "warfare," the systematic cultivation of intergroup violence with a glorified place in social norms for the mighty warrior; what we might call "war" among gatherer-hunters is a disruption of the social norm akin to a natural catastrophe. But it surely did happen.
The basic economics of gatherer-hunting helps us understand why there was no glorification of warfare; there is no surplus other bands possess to be taken as booty; there is no way to take and hold booty if they find peoples who have surplus (Turnbull reported the Mbuti would pilfer metal items from their Bantu neighbors and describe this as "hunting" or "finding" the items, but of course there were sharp limits to how much they could take!) The only stake in the fight is, who winds up in possession of a range of land.
I gather from all the talk about the Inuit displacing the Dorset culture that these people were not assimilated into the Inuit but somehow killed off--one wants to say "driven" off but recognizes they were "driven" into oblivion! I guess each people "hunted" the other and it was the Inuit who came out the survivors.
We'll have to describe and agree upon a particular scenario of the Inuit transformation. The point is, whatever the Inuit were like OTL, they will be different in this timeline if they cease being gatherer-hunters primarily. Unlike OTL Inuit, they may well find it profitable to dominate rather than eradicate other peoples, if they can somehow manipulate these others into producing and yielding up surplus to them. This kind of thing is probably the origin of clans, and states, and history as we know it.
I do cling to a belief I picked up in the 1980s, that there was generally an intermediate stage between gatherer-hunter societies and the sorts of warlike pastoralists and agriculturalists we find so thick on the ground in anthropology and history; that generally with the rise of agriculture there would have been a transitional society that attempted to incorporate the new modes of production into the old gatherer-hunter ethical framework and worldview. I believe that progress in this mode, tricky as it might have been from time to time in resolving crises not known to their purely GH ancestors, did allow great expansions of population and the development of institutions. But that it was only metastable; eventually the paradigms of war for domination and plunder did evolve and when they did, they tended to propagate themselves. But I doubt such societies could arise without there first being some development of a surplus-producing economy to plunder and rule!
What is being discussed here doesn't really allow much time for that sort of evolution; we are jumping directly from GH to some kind of aristocratic conquering people.
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(3) The third, and probably the sexiest topic, iron. ...What are the chances that smelting and working Bog Iron could be a cultural transfer item?
I suspect that if you want this, you may also have a solution to the conundrum I posed above.
The only way they are going to get even the rudiments of making even bog iron is if they have some extensive contact with the Greenland colony. And lo, the earlier date you propose for the major divergence from OTL is already 900 CE. The Vikings are coming, very soon, possibly already there for later transitions.
The jump from a primarily hunting society to a meta-hunter of other peoples may well be catalyzed by the Viking example.
Even if it is just to say that overall, the relations between Inuit and Vikings will be hostile, I find it hard to believe that no one on either side will ever try to get along for mutual benefit. Nordic society was wracked with feuds and rivalries; someone who is on the outs and otherwise lacking sufficient resources for a comeback might well explore the options of some kind of alliance with Inuit leadership. Curiousity on both sides; a friendlier mood in relaxed times, and I imagine that friendships as well as longer-lasting alliances might arise between particular Inuit and particular Nordics. This might lead to an understanding on the part of some of these Nordics that however good European agriculture and other practices might be elsewhere, in the lands the Inuit live in they are no option, whereas the Inuit and their subject peoples can and do survive there somehow. They might cease to see the Inuit simply as savage "Skraelings" and come to appreciate them more. They might actually go very far north, as guests of particular Inuit, and these contacts might lead to quite extensive exchanges of information.
Furthermore, when the Little Ice Age closes in--well, the Inuit will have their problems too. But the Greenlanders are screwed.
I gather that OTL there is little to no evidence that they either sailed away to Iceland or points east, nor that they were assimilated into the Inuit. But ITTL, the latter is a much better option.
The Imperial High Inuit phase might actually be an amalgam of Inuit and Viking-European. Among other things, that might facilitate your desired transfer of ironworking lore.
