New research spins intriguing Inuit yarn

New research is upending old assumptions about what the ancestors of today’s Inuit learned from Viking settlers.

Michele Hayeur Smith, of Brown University in Rhode Island, and her colleagues were looking at scraps of yarn, perhaps used to hang amulets or decorate clothing, from ancient sites on Baffin Island and the Ungava Peninsula.

The origin of the yarn spun from animal hair and sinew had bedevilled scientists for generations. Most assumed it was a skill picked up from Vikings who sailed west from Greenland about 1,000 years ago.

Hayeur Smith, who specializes in the study of ancient textiles, had her doubts. First, the yarn didn’t look like anything she’d seen in years of examining Norse fibres. Second, why would the ancient Dorset and Thule people of the Arctic — highly skilled clothes-makers — need to learn such a basic technique from anyone else?

“The idea that you would have to learn to spin something from another culture was a bit ludicrous,” she said.

The problem was that anything impregnated with oil from sea mammals has been almost impossible to carbon date.

Until now. Co-author Gorill Nilsen of Norway’s Tromso University came up with a way to “shampoo” the oil out of the fibres without damaging them. Some fibres from a site on Baffin’s southern coast were then subjected to the latest carbondating methods.

The yarn clustered into a period from about 100 AD to about 600-800 AD — roughly 1,000 years to 500 years before the Vikings ever showed up.