Lynda Gullason

Canadian archaeologist Lynda Gullason's area of research is the Thule and Historic Inuit occupation of the Arctic over the past thousand years, in particular the kinds of interactions these people had with the various European cultures they encountered and the challenge of seeing this contact archaeologically. She draws on the intersecting fields of archaeology, history, ethnohistory, and most recently, geochemistry, to do so.

Lynda has conducted field work in southeast Baffin Island in the eastern Arctic on the impact of the Elizabethan voyages of explorer Martin Frobisher and subsequent commercial whaling and fur trade contact on Thule Inuit culture. She is interested in the role that gender plays in cross-cultural contact, in terms of access to and use of European goods and materials. She received her PhD at McGill University in Montreal for this work. Using museum collections from Arctic Canada, Greenland and Alaska, she has studied the importance of copper and iron as raw materials for Thule Inuit tool-making both before and after European contact. Lynda's current research focuses on identifying and sourcing metal artifacts by their elemental composition. She is an Adjunct Research Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa.