Inuit Prehistory Enters the Digital Age

Virtual reality project makes life in a whalebone hut come alive for younger generations.  

By Grady Semmens

When he was a boy growing up in the Canadian Arctic, Mark Kalluak would sit spellbound as he listened to his grandparents’ stories about the ancient ways of the Inuit people. Tales of travelling to seasonal hunting grounds and living in huts and igloos have been impressed upon Kalluak’s imagination as far back as he can remember. But it wasn’t until he travelled thousands of kilometres south from the hamlet of Arviat, on the western shore of Hudson Bay, that he was able to get a first-hand look at how his ancestors might have lived hundreds of years ago. Even more ironic is the fact that it also took the latest in video game technology to give Kalluak a sense of how his people lived in one of the world’s most forbidding environments.

“All the stories I used to hear when I was young are coming back to me,” the 66-year-old Inuit elder said as he manoeuvred his way through the dim interior of a whalebone hut in the computer-generated world of the U of C’s Schlumberger iCentre. “It really makes me think about what it would have been like to live in my ancestors’ home.”

Kalluak and elders Louis Angalik and Donald Uluadluak made a special trip to the facility known as the virtual reality CAVE recently to see a 3-D simulation of the prehistoric dwelling based on an archaeological site in the far north. Their visit was part of an ongoing collaboration between their community and U of C archaeology professor Peter Dawson, who is working with cultural leaders in Nunavut to find new ways of teaching Inuit about their distant past. With the help of virtual reality expert Richard Levy, a professor in the Faculty of Environmental Design, the team has developed a life-sized re-creation of a Thule-era home based on the remains of a 600-year-old village discovered on Bathurst Island in the mid-1990s.

The elders donned stereoscopic glasses, stepped into the cul-de-sac of screens and within seconds were surrounded by a tent of animal skins supported by the arching ribs of a bowhead whale. Inside the tent, an Inuit family prepares a meal by a fire, traditional tools can be found on the shelves and a lone drum beats heavily in the distance. The three elders scan the room and attempt to touch the illusory objects, as they whisper and talk amongst themselves in Inuktituk.

“This is as close as we can get to having a time machine,” said Dawson. “We’ve been able to create a structure that hasn’t been seen in three dimensions for more than 500 years and it’s fascinating to see how people react when they realize they can go inside and move around the space.”

“I feel like a magician,” said 75-year-old Donald Uluadluak through a translator. “No one has ever seen these buildings before. Now we are able to and it will help us understand who we were.”

Creating the whalebone house required years of research and computer programming that grew out of an earlier project to reconstruct an Inuvialuit sod and driftwood house, which was exhibited at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec. Working from the remains of the Thule village, Levy and Dawson came up with a blueprint for what one of the houses may have looked like and then set about constructing it in virtual reality based on the archaeological and existing cultural information. The project required laser scanning the skeleton of a North Atlantic right whale on display at the New England Aquarium in Boston, and then trying to reconstruct how the interior of the hut might have appeared when it was inhabited by an Inuit family.

“We’ve tried to make it as accurate as possible based on what we know about the culture and the climate of the area,” Dawson said. “It would have been almost completely dark for four or five months of the year, so we tried to determine how much light would have been necessary inside the home for people to do tasks such as cooking and sewing.”

The researchers were also able to determine that the layout of the skeleton frame was such that the home mimicked the living anatomy of the whale, with the entrance to the hut through the whale’s mouth and living quarters in its belly. Kalluak said this reminded him of a traditional Inuit tale about a man who lived in a whale.

“Maybe this legend comes from when we lived in these kinds of houses,” he said.

The researchers are now working with the elders and officials from the Inuit Heritage Trust and Nunavut’s Ministry of Education to produce educational packages that use the computer images to help teach Inuit youth about their ancient past.

“It’s hard to imagine something if you’ve never seen it before and something like this makes it so much easier to imagine what life was like in the old days than just reading about it in a book,” said Nunia Qanatsiaq with the ministry’s curriculum and school services division, who accompanied the elders to Calgary. The researchers are also working with Calgary’s Glenbow Museum to create a 3-D website based on the simulation to give users a sense of what life was like for the ancient Thule people.

For elders like Kalluak, bringing the old ways to life using computer animation is exciting because it is engaging for computer-savvy young people.

“A lot of young people don’t seem too interested in learning about the old ways, but I think they would with something like this,” he said. “It’s a new way for them to learn and that is always valuable.”

Reconstruction of an ancient Thule culture whalebone hut from Bathurst Island in Canada’s high Arctic was done using maps of
the archaeological site and the latest in computer imaging software in the U of C’s Schlumberger iCentre.

Left and below:

Images from the interior of the 3-D virtual reality reconstruction of the 500-year-old whalebone hut. Whale bones used to construct the frame of the simulation were scanned from a skeleton at the New England Aquarium in Boston.

Photos courtesy of
Richard Levy