The first pictorial engravings

Eskimo hunting culture developed in the Bering Strait region more than two thousand years ago. Many of the earliest known ivory tools, such as harpoons, are finely engraved with decorative geometric designs.

It seems likely that the pictorial engraving style, characterized by realistic, cartoon-like depictions of game animals and everyday life, developed out of these native carving traditions more recently. This may have occurred during the Thule period, from around AD 1000. Ivory tools with pictorial engravings have been excavated at Thule sites in Alaska, as well as occasionally at early Thule sites in the central and eastern Canadian Arctic. Among these, there is a drill bow excavated near Arctic Bay on Baffin Island in Nunavut, dating to the fourteenth to sixteenth century. This shows scenes of hunting, tents, and stretched polar bear skins.

While a few artefacts featuring pictorial engravings have been found in the Eastern Arctic, most come from a limited area of Alaska inhabited by the Iñupiat. This is the coastal region of Bering Strait, around and to the north of Norton Sound. Within this region, most documented engraved ivories seem to have come from the Seward Peninsula (see map). This is the area that the walrus pass through on their spring and autumn migrations. It was here therefore that hunters could gain easy access to walrus ivory, the preferred material for carvings of any kind.

While the emergence of the pictorial engraving style predates European contact, Euro-American influence was a major factor in its further development in the late nineteenth century.