William W. Fitzhugh

• 1. Introduction

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  William Wyvill Fitzhugh IV has spent more than forty years asking a simple question: what does it take for people to survive at the edges of the world? As director of the Smithsonian's Arctic Studies Center and a Senior Scientist at the National Museum of Natural History, he has chased that question from the coast of Labrador to the steppes of Mongolia. His work has reached millions of people through major international exhibitions, films broadcast on NOVA, and more than 150 journal articles. One of his exhibitions, the Vikings show mounted in 2000, earned a cover story in Time magazine. How did a young man shaped by Professor Elmer Harp at Dartmouth end up becoming the architect of America's only federal program devoted entirely to northern cultural research? And what do Bronze Age deer stones in Mongolia have to do with the art of the Bering Sea?

• 2. From Dartmouth to Harvard

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  Professor Elmer Harp at Dartmouth College handed Fitzhugh his first real introduction to archaeological fieldwork and Inuit studies in the Hudson Bay region of northern Canada. That early exposure set a direction that two years of U.S. Navy service only interrupted, not erased. Fitzhugh enrolled in the graduate program at Harvard University and received his PhD in anthropology in 1970. His dissertation focused on the environmental archaeology and cultural systems of coastal Labrador. On graduating, he accepted a position at the National Museum of Natural History as Curator of North American Anthropology. He later honored Harp by co-editing a festschrift in his name, published by the Arctic Studies Center in 2001.

• 3. Labrador as Laboratory

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  Central and northern Labrador became the primary testing ground for Fitzhugh's ideas about how people adapt to arctic and sub-arctic change. Successive field expeditions there documented the full sequence of culture history and settlement, pulling together archaeologists, ethnographers, paleoecologists, and geologists in a single collaborative effort. That work eventually reached into the broader circumpolar world, from Scandinavia to Alaska, as Fitzhugh pushed for comparative research across the entire northern arc. Since 2000, his attention has shifted to the Lower North Shore of Quebec near the Labrador border, where prehistoric Indian and Inuit cultures intersected with European Basque whalers. The 2006 paper "Cultures, Borders, and Basques" documented those archaeological surveys for the British Archaeological Reports International Series.

• 4. Exhibitions as Scholarship

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  "Inua: Spirit World of the Bering Sea Eskimo" opened in 1982 and traveled to Alaska in 1983, running through 1986. It earned the Case Book Award, and the catalogue Fitzhugh co-authored with Susan A. Kaplan ran to 296 pages. "Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska," which Fitzhugh co-edited with Aron Crowell, launched in 1988 and toured through 1992. A version called "Crossroads Alaska/Siberia" continued through 1996. "Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People" followed in 1999, with a catalogue of 415 pages co-edited with Chisato Dubrueil and published jointly by the Arctic Studies Center and the University of Washington Press. Each of these catalogues was designed to make specialist research accessible to general exhibition visitors, not just academic readers.

• 5. Vikings and the North Atlantic

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  "Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga" opened in 2000 and became one of the most visible achievements of Fitzhugh's career. Time magazine ran a cover story on the exhibition. The accompanying catalogue, co-edited with Elisabeth I. Ward, ran to 424 pages and went on to win the Society for American Archaeology Book Award for 2001. A NOVA film called "Viking America" had already aired in 1995 and received an honorable mention at the Keil Archaeological Film Festival. A History Channel production on the Vikings followed in 2002. The crossover between television, exhibition, and peer-reviewed publication allowed the research to reach audiences that rarely intersect.

• 6. Mongolia and the Deer Stones

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  Fitzhugh's curiosity about the origins of Bering Sea Eskimo culture pulled him far from the Arctic, deep into northern Russia and Mongolia. There he began investigating reindeer herding along the forest-steppe border between Tuva and Mongolia. His studies of Mongolia's Bronze Age deer stones suggested possible links to Scythian art of Western Asia and, in the opposite direction, to early East Asian art and the art of the Bering Sea Eskimos. The Deer Stone Project, covering fieldwork from 2002 to 2004, produced a 256-page volume co-edited with J. Bayarsaikhan and Peter K. Marsh, published jointly by the Arctic Studies Center and the National Museum of Mongolian History in Ulaanbaatar in 2005.

• 7. The Arctic Studies Center

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  Fitzhugh established the Arctic Studies Center in 1988, making it the only U.S. government program with a dedicated focus on northern cultural research and education. The center sits within the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of American History. Its collections cover arctic and sub-arctic ethnology, with the majority of objects acquired between 1858 and 1890 by naturalists working in the Mackenzie District, Ungava, Baffin Island, Coppermine, Alaska, and Siberia. A second division operates in Anchorage, Alaska, bringing Smithsonian researchers into direct collaboration with community scholars. Fitzhugh chaired the Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology from 1975 to 1980 and again from 2002 to 2005, and he holds an advisory role with the Arctic Research Commission.

• 8. Film, Awards, and Legacy

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  "Secrets of the Lost Red Paint People" aired on European television in 1987 and reached American audiences as "Mysteries of the Lost Red Paint Culture" on NOVA in 1988, winning the Cine Golden Eagle Award that year. A 1972 book on environmental archaeology in Hamilton Inlet, Labrador ran to 245 pages plus maps, illustrations, tables, and plates, published as part of the Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology series. The 1984 Stiegler Award from the University of Arkansas recognized earlier work. The Smithsonian Distinguished Lecturer Award came in 2003. A 2002 paper titled "Yamal to Greenland: Global Connections in Circumpolar Archaeology" appeared in a volume edited by Barry Cunliffe, Wendy Davies, and Colin Renfrew, published by Oxford University Press, and stretched the comparative frame from the Yamal Peninsula of Siberia all the way to the western North Atlantic.