Basque Whalers & Southern Inuit: Worlds in Collision or Collaboration?

Basque/Inuit Archaeology in the Northern Gulf of St. Lawrence
Exploring Climate, Environment, and Cultural Interactions
William Fitzhugh
Director, Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center,
Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History
Dartmouth College Visiting Professor, Department of Anthropology

During the 16-17th centuries, in the midst of the Little Ice Age, two pioneering peoples from opposite corners of the world reached the northeastern Gulf of St. Lawrence and found ways to collaborate in unusual ways. Basques provided European material culture in return for Inuit assistance whaling and codfishing. Both were eventually driven out—the Inuit to northern Labrador and the Basques succumbed to competition from other European whalers and fishermen. This seminar explores the climate, environment, and cultural factors leading to the rise and decline of the first Inuit-European joint venture in the New World.

Sponsored by the Institute of Arctic Studies at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.

Recorded April 22, 2019