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The Arctic is a harsh landscape. The territories have been repeatedly scoured by glaciers, the last of them retreating only some ten thousand years ago. In many areas, glacial action scoured the land down to raw bedrock. In other places, moving walls of ice picked up sands and gravel, depositing them in bands and eskers. Glacial melt basins pooled dust. Temperature extremes from summer to winter, water freezing and thawing, eroding winds and poor drainage have resulted in a landscape of rough soils, gravel and broken rock.
Winds are almost constant through the arctic. The wind dissipates heat readily, lowering overall temperatures. It also steals moisture, leaving a dry ‘arctic desert’ in many areas. Rainfall is infrequent, most of the water comes down as snow. In the Arctic Islands, precipitation is so sparse that the area is almost a desert. The driving wind picks up dust in the summer, ice crystals in the winter, both of which abrade tall plants like sandpaper. Unlike Siberia, the surrounding arctic ocean moderates temperatures, saving winters from the worst polar extremes, but also keeping summers cold, and making for late springs and early falls.
In many areas cold temperatures inhibit soil formation, slowing the decomposition of compost and plant material and reducing bacterial process to low levels. Biological processes cease completely in the cold winters. The result is a high organic matter content, but this biological wealth is slow to be released. River drainage, winds, extreme temperature fluctuations, the cycle of freeze and thaw, and groundwater and permafrost create a strange cryosoil. Go down a few feet, and you come to permafrost, perpetually and permanently frozen water saturating sandy soils and gravels.
Plants in the arctic have adapted to the conditions they find. Many arctic plants stay low, a low growing structure helps to avoid scouring by wind driven ice particles, while taking advantage of warm temperatures occurring at a thin boundary of almost still air close to the surface. Very few arctic plants reach any height. Two or three feet is tall for the Arctic, and most are shorter, many are much shorter. Both Roseroot and Sweetvetch reach an average height of a foot and a half. Claytonia is a fraction of that.
Many Arctic plants are like icebergs, with most of the plants mass hidden underground, and only a fraction above the surface. Claytonia is a classic example, a plant with a three foot root, that pokes a mere nine inches above ground. But Sweetvetch and Roseroot, and in fact many arctic plants share this quality - large root complexes which store energy and mass in order to get an early jumpstart on photosynthesis when its available.
Most arctic plants are perrenial, using longevity to ensure continuous presence when propagation is difficult and infrequent, and pacing growth out over two to ten seasons, maximizing their biological potential. Some are evergreen, maintaining leaves and stems to amortize biological production into the next year. Others like fireweed and roseoot will have leaves and stems which die off in fall, providing insulation and trapping moisture at the base of the plant.
Difficulty in propagation often means that plants of a species cluster closely together, forming clumps, matts and cushions. Dense growth of matts or cushions means more seed producing individuals, with more chance of propagating seeds. Clustering together means mutual shelter and maximizing the productive capacity of a given area.
These plants are extremely tolerant of freezing and dessication, not just in winter, but in other seasons, and thus are resistant to untimely frost events. They’re extremely tolerant of poor soils and low nutrients. There are subtle adaptations, leaves are often small, they can be hairy, or curl to trap little pockets of air to preserve warmth that would otherwise be stolen by direct exposure to wind. And of course, they share a capacity to begin growth almost immediately following snowmelt in the spring. Basically, they’re hardy opportunists, ready to take maximum advantage of the very short warm spells when they occur.
Despite these adaptations, there are large stretches of the arctic where it is little more than scoured rock and relic glaciers, a stony lifeless desert that you could mistake for the surface of Mars. There are immense rolling plains of tundra, exposed to wind, drained of moisture, warmth stolen away, sandblasted by ice and grit, which are basically lichens and moss, sparse and barren, where vegetation clings grimly to the landscape.
But the thing with life, is that it will find a way. There are a few advantages for Arctic plants. For instance, there’s sunlight. Lots of it. That far up the curvature of the earth, the intensity of sunlight is attenuated and often deflected by cloud cover, but over approximately 120 day growing season, sunlight can last anywhere from 18 hours a day all the way up to 24/7. That’s a lot of energy, and a lot of warmth accumulating.
For many plants, the name of the game is microclimates. How do you thrive when the wind steals away your warmth and water and scours your leaves?
Get out of the fucking wind. Get warm. Get more sun. These sound trite, but as noted, getting out of the wind is a universal strategy - that’s why arctic plants grow so low to the ground. Crevices, ditches, gullys, valleys, the sheltered side of hills all take plants out of the wind, and that makes a huge difference.
Without the wind, things can get very warm. Here’s an example: At Lake Hazen, on Ellesmere Island on 23 May 1958, surface soil temperatures as high as 21–24°C were recorded on a south-facing slope, the maximum open air temperature recorded was -5.6 C, essentially, the temperature at soil level was a full thirty degrees warmer than the open air. It would be a full two weeks before the open air temperature rose above freezing.
Ellesmere Island is about as close as you can get to the north pole, no joke. As you can see, biological strategies, or locations which get you out of the wind, get you a shot at a much warmer, biologically more productive environment. Warmer soils for longer periods are more biologically active, more organic matter is broken down into nutrients, soils become richer.
Of course, we’ve loaded the dice. That Ellesmere Island temperature was recorded on a south facing slope. The farther north you get, the more the inclination of the landscape affects the amount of light received. On Ellesmere Island a south-facing 30 degree slope receives about 15% more of the possible total solar radiation than a flat plane. Slopes facing other directions are at a disadvantage. For example, a steep north slope would receive less than half the sunlight received by that same flat plane we mentioned earlier.
At high latitudes, the sun remains at stable altitudes, rather than crossing the arch of the sky, which makes for stability under constant daylight and night time cooling is minimized or largely absent with the ground remaining warmer than the air throughout the summer. The results are that the frost-free growing season at ground surface level may be 3–4 weeks longer than open air temperatures would suggest.
If we can get microclimates like these as far north as Ellesmere Island, it becomes clear that its possible to magnify or maximize biological production in pockets of areas which would seem inescapably barren. It was the development and manipulation of microclimates which was the foundation of Arctic Agriculture technology, that marked the leap from a culture of relatively passive harvesters to one producing organized agricultural surpluses.
The specific location where Thule Agriculture first began is a matter of controversy. Favoured sites include the McKenzie Bay, Baffin Island or the Hudson Bay coast. All of these areas show archeological traces indicating systematic cultivation during the period 1170 - 1240. Due to intervening distances, however, it is considered extremely unlikely that one site’s development spread to the other sites.
Indeed, it is now believed that Agriculture may have emerged spontaneously, independently in several different locations, from a fairly uniform underlying cultural strata. To put it another way, a vast part of the Thule range had reached such an advanced state of pre-agricultural root propagation and harvest that many areas were able to take the next step on their own. In this interpretation, which specific area technically came first is largely academic. Agriculture spread from multiple points, and literally bootstrapped itself into existence.
Another view is that continuing expansion of territory and food resources drove a slow population explosion, which pushed the Thule into a malthusian crisis, which forced the development of agriculture in different areas.
Still another approach suggests that there was an additional common feature. The Thule expansion from their Alaskan Homeland, across the Arctic seems to coincide, at least initially, with the Medieval Warm Period, which endured from 800 to 1250. At least one theory suggests that the warm period produced a proliferation of fish and wildlife which triggered Thule overpopulation and waves of outward migration and expansion.
The end of the Medieval Warm period seems to coincide with the development of Thule Agriculture. Worsening or cooling climactic conditions had a double impact. Cooling had a negative impact on the animal populations that formed the backbone of the diet, forcing the Thule to rely much more heavily on plant harvest.
Cooling also impacted the plant harvest itself, both the range and quality of naturally occurring vegetation, forcing the Thule to adapt by aggressively maximizing their pre-agricultural harvest and propagation techniques, and wielding them into an agricultural package.
The early phase of the Agricultural revolution was simply a consolidation and expansion of existing techniques. With game declining from year to year, and average temperatures dropping, the Thule responded the way people always respond - by increasing effort. This meant more hunting, and hunting over larger areas, more intense hunting of previously overlooked or undesired species.
It also meant more intensive plant harvesting. This included more intensive and systematic harvesting of edible plants which hadn’t up to this time been a critical part of diet. But as conditions worsened, fewer and fewer food sources could be passed up. Berries, stems, leaves were scoured. Much more attention was paid to these plants, and their share of diet increased.
More intensive harvesting also included plants, especially the root staples, sweetvetch, claytonia and roseroot. But there came bottlenecks. There was visibly less to be gained by harvesting immature plants, and the harvesters knew it. It was understood that premature harvesting would result in a reduced yield now, and a much diminished yield in the future. So excess harvesting pressure was frowned upon.
Instead the increased effort was directed to planting and propagation. In Alaska, planting and propagation had been limited to existing patches, and sweetvetch and claytonia had spread gradually and naturally from there over time. Out in the lands we know as the Canadian north, this habit had morphed to planting and propagation in likely areas believed to contain favourable spirits, which had over time resulted in the plants becoming widespread.
Now with fewer and fewer options, planting effort intensified, and planting took place in any habitat that seemed suitable. Inevitably, the Thule outran primary plant habitat, attempting to maximize the distribution of their root crops. The result of course was planting effort in places where the root crops fared poorly or did not take at all.
Now, this is the critical point. It is possible that the Thule cultivation effort would stop there, and we would have simply seen some incremental adjustments in the plants range, and a continuation of hunter gatherer society. The Agricultural revolution might never have taken place.
But Thule culture had, for want of a better phrase, developed a pattern of active negotiation with the spirits. This had begun with replanting root bits when harvesting. It had extended to planting seeds and root sections in new areas, and tacit agreements with the spirits to harvest later, an agreement that included the commitment to wait to return. But the cultural traits had continued to elaborate, Sweetvetch grew readily, but both Roseroot and Claytonia required more care and attention in propagation, there had been an evolving tradition in planting or transplanting these, of taking more measures, and taking specific measures to protect the plants. The accumulated cultural wisdom was that the spirits could be finicky, but also that they could be propitiated, that they could be jollied along.
So, as Sweetvetch, Claytonia and Roseroot plantings were extended beyond their prime habitat, they did poorly. This was obviously because the spirits were unhappy. The question was what was required to make them happier. By this time, culture had accumulated a significant amount of information and insight, and the effects of wind exposure or lack of water were intuitively grasped.
This triggered Shaman-lead communal labour efforts to please the earth spirits. Earth and gravel were mounded to form wind breaks, which had the effect of allowing local temperatures on the other side of the windbreak to build up. Shallow trenches were dug or scooped to create warm recessed habitat, or make permafrost more accessible. It’s difficult to say to what extent these practices were motivated by direct cause and effect, far more likely was the sentiment that these actions encouraged goodwill from the spirits. But the effect was that vegetation grew faster and thrived more visibly.
More banked mounds were built up or reshaped to form ‘snow catchers’, places that drifting snow would build up into banks, providing critical moisture. Mounds were extended in both directions, forming long lines which curved, bent, looped or formed angles. Mound lines were generally small, often no more than a couple of feet in height, the tallest might be five or six feet.
To maximize wind protection and moisture accumulation, mound lines were built in succession, one after the other.
On the protected sides of mound lines, shallow trenches were dug to create warmer recessed plant habitat. Between mound lines, narrower and deeper trenches drained land or facilitated irrigation, sometimes moving water in or out of carefully selected gaps. Drainage and irrigation became more elaborate and ambitious. Earthworks were raised to shield against and store floodwaters for later use. Heavy snow cover was ponded during melt season and drained. Trenches were dug into permafrost to release local water. Irrigation channels were used to divert water from rivers and streams.
Mound construction was often a matter of trial and error, as the builders searched for the best locations and designs to block the arctic wind or gather snow and water. These communal labour efforts were small scale, carried on at the level of clans or groups, involving no more than a handful of individuals at a time, and using traditional digging/harvesting tools. But they were significant, and they were cumulative, year after year. The different pioneer agricultural complexes all evolved their own mound techniques and shapes, but each of them independently developed their own mound and trench techniques.
[Fig c.1. Types of Thule Mound lines. Taken from the Journals of Kenneth Malt, a British diplomat who travelled extensively through Thule lands, 1752-1756, and made numerous sketches. Malt was particularly interested in northern agriculture and landforms, and his sketchbooks and journals are considered to be landmark works in Thule studies. This drawing depicts the various styles of mound shapes that Malt encountered.]