ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the Western concept of "Aboriginal" has very little to do with a history of colonization, but instead carries a significant weight of meaning derived from earlier European concepts of "primitive man". It also argues that archaeology has contributed significantly to the perpetuation of this perspective. The chapter focuses on the Inuit societies of Arctic Canada and Greenland, and discusses how views of Inuit history have contributed to the portrayal of Inuit society in the contemporary world. The first scholar to speculate on the history of the Inuit was David Cranz, an eighteenth-century Moravian missionary to Greenland. Archaeologists have known since the early 1920s that ancestral Inuit have no ancient history of occupation in Arctic Canada and Greenland. The image of the Inuit as a simple, unspoiled society of capable but primitive hunters is intimately related to the view of Inuit history as an ancient and isolated adaptation to their hostile environment.
