ABSTRACT
Violent conflict among indigenous hunter-gather peoples across the North American Arctic occurred on two extremes. There are numerous locations that have names signifying past violent encounters across the North American Arctic. However, when it comes to discussing ethnographic accounts of larger-scale violence, what is often referred to as warfare, there are very few instances recorded in the eastern Arctic, particularly when it comes to Inuit-versus-Inuit group interactions. It also brought with it slat armor, which is probably the most reliable artifact type to predicate the presence of larger-scale violence in the Arctic. How quickly attitudes changed toward larger-scale conflicts during the initial Thule migrations into the eastern Arctic is unknown, assuming larger-scale violence was endemic in the west at the time of their departure. It is clear from the ethnographic record that during late prehistoric and early historic times in the western Arctic the scale of violence was considerably higher than in the eastern Arctic.
