Marginal No More: Introduction to a Special Issue on the Archaeology of Northern Coasts

The idea for this special issue developed out of conference session that I coorganized with Dr. Anne Jensen for the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) Annual Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia in 2017. During that session we heard from a number of researchers—several of whom have contributed to this volume—about the important contributions that coastal archaeology in the Arctic and Subarctic could make to our understanding of a wide variety of anthropological issues, past and present. This contribution will not be a surprise to regular readers of this journal and archaeologists who work in the north. We have long recognized the importance of coastal landscapes and the littoral and marine resources to which they provide access as key to our understanding of northern cultures and their histories. Even Arctic and Subarctic cultures that live significant distances from the coast often have complex relationships and histories associated with them and their peoples. What we have been a bit slower to recognize, or at least publicize, is their importance to our understanding of larger global scale issues, particularly climate change and its impacts on coastal peoples and world heritage sites and, by extension, everyone else.

Nothing made this more obvious than when I was listening to a variety of presentations at the most recent SAA meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I noticed how frequently Arctic peoples are relied upon as analogs for a wide variety of topics: from hunter-gatherer architecture to technological innovation, but perhaps most often, as a canary in the coal mine for climate change and its impact on coastal and island cultures around the world. Those of us who work in the north have long been discussing human-environment interaction in northern landscapes and how much they have been influenced by regional and global scale climate fluctuations. But now the cultures we have studied are increasingly recognized as having much broader lessons that extend well beyond the north and, therefore, a special journal issue like this could not be more timely. The regions that many people view as the margins of human civilization are becoming more central to our understanding of the evolution and development of humanity and are providing information about directions forward in a world with increasing cultural interactivity and global climate unpredictability. Understanding the role that northern coasts and marine ecosystems play in this is crucial.

In the last couple of decades, coastal research has been grabbing a larger part of the archaeological spotlight. This can be seen in the growing number of coastal-focused edited volumes, monographs, articles, and even an entire journal solely dedicated to the archaeology of islands and coasts. Coasts and islands are seen as important study locations that are crucial to our understanding of human evolution, social complexity, and ecological theory, and they have often been conceptualized as "laboratories" to examine regional and continental-scale social and cultural processes. The coasts of the Arctic and Subarctic were (and are) attractive places that provide all that northern communities needed and more, and the surrounding seas served to connect communities and facilitate interaction rather than acting as barriers. Northern communities acknowledged and faced the challenges of living on them in incredibly innovative social and material ways. The reasons that these adaptations are often relied upon as archaeological analogies for hunters and gatherers around the world is because of their deep history and connections to modern peoples, but also because they are still often erroneously considered representatives of more "primitive" times, although people have gotten better at concealing those philosophical roots by making such associations more implicit. What northern anthropologists understand is that Arctic and Subarctic coastal peoples have always been pioneering and inventive cultures that have created some of the most sustained cultural traditions known on Earth.

The articles in this volume are just a small glimpse into the variety of ways that northern peoples have found to live and thrive along Arctic and Subarctic coasts and some of the modern challenges to understanding and preserving their heritage. They do not just focus on a single aspect of coastal...