Reimagining Human-Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lacey Fleming. Robert Losey.

Humans and dogs have been living together for thousands of years, participating in various forms of relationships. One of these relationships involves the partial or complete provisioning of dogs by humans. Because of these practices, it has been argued that a dog’s diet should generally resemble that of the humans with whom it lived. This proposed interspecies dietary similarity has been an important aspect of some archaeological studies in that dog stable isotope values are in many cases used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Friesen. Andrew Stewart.

Complex relationships between people and animals define life in the northern past. For Inuit these relationships are manifested in many ways; particularly in practices that are often described as "showing respect" for animals, thus promoting stable relations between animal and human societies. Frustratingly, many of these activities, which are so prominent in the ethnographic record, have few archaeological correlates. Here, we examine one important practice with a relatively high level of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aripekka Junno. Hirofumi Kato. Sven Isaksson. Peter Jordan.

This paper investigates long-term human-animal interactions among Okhotsk cultures in Hokkaido, northern Japan. The Okhotsk Culture were maritime foragers and traders who expanded out from the Amur into Hokkaido and Sakhalin Island from about AD 600, with many of their distinctive traits and practices such as elaborate bear ceremonialism and other hunting rituals persisting into the historic Ainu cultures. Our ongoing research aims to understand the origins, spatiotemporal variability and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Goodwin. Lisa Hodgetts.

Outstanding organic preservation at many Arctic sites gives archaeologists access to large artifactual and faunal assemblages through which to examine human-animal interactions. However, much of the research focused on these interactions conceives them not only in ecological/economic terms, but also examines them at the level of entire communities (e.g. zooarchaeological studies of subsistence) or focuses on the predominantly male realm of hunting. The Arctic ethnographic record reflects a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Cesario.

In both past and present, pastoralism has been an integral part of life in Iceland. In fact, status is generally defined by how many cattle one can keep; however, wild resources are abundant in Iceland and are also used to supplement the diet. For much of Iceland’s history, wild resource use and access was heavily regulated through formal laws and social contracts that often favored elite landowners. Using case studies from Skagafjörður, North Iceland, this paper will explore the use of wild...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Jordan.

In Arctic Archaeology, human-animal relations have traditionally been studied in terms of ecology, optimality and adaptation; more recently, there has been growing interest in understanding how spiritual obligations affected treatment of circumpolar animals and their physical remains. Although these symbolic perspectives were initially useful, many tended to draw on ethnography, especially when using the concept of a single overarching ‘Circumpolar Cosmology; unfortunately, this can reduce...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anja Mansrud.

This contribution aims to investigate the entanglement of environment, materiality, technology and cosmology in the Middle Mesolithic Stone-Age (8300-6300 cal. BC), of the North East Skagerrak area, Eastern Norway and Western Sweden, by focusing on the manufacture of bone-fishhooks. I argue that fishhooks are keys objects for exploring the world-views of Middle Mesolithic coastal groups. Fishhooks were linked with daily subsistence, invested with much labour, and their manufacture entwined with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Armstrong Oma.

The three-aisled longhouse is one of the most long-lived forms of dwelling-place known from prehistory, with its span from the Early Bronze Age (1500 BCE) until the Viking period (1000C CE). During some 2500 years, the architectural outline and form remained surprisingly similar. The three-aisled longhouse is, in terms of human culture (albeit not in geological terms), a longue durée institution, a materialisation of a particular lived space, where humans and domestic animals lived under the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Whitridge.

Schematic harvesting scenes incised on tools are a stock variety of both precontact and historic Inuit graphic art. They sometimes seem to depict historically specific events, which they effectively commemorate, and have real (sometimes precise) informational content that must have been important for the dissemination of technical harvesting knowledge among a hunter’s peers, and its inter-generational transfer. However, the harvesting setups – such as a boatload of hunters on the verge of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna-Kaisa Salmi.

Animal offerings made at various sacred sites were an integral part of the ethnic religion of the indigenous Sámi people of northern parts of present-day Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia from ca. 800 AD onwards. The offering tradition was interwoven with subsistence patterns and human-animal relationships, as in the Sámi worldview, offerings were a means to communicate with gods and guardian spirits of animals to negotiate things such as success in hunting or reindeer husbandry. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elna Siv Kristoffersen.

The presentation takes up a northern way of expression opposed to a southern one – namely the stylistic depiction and focus on animals and mixed animal/human designs prevailing in the Nordic Barbaric area opposed to a focus on the naturalistic ideal of the human body throughout the classical world. The complexity and continuity of this Nordic art form indicates that it was structurally incorporated in an overarching principle that reflects social and cosmic order. The mixed animal-human designs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Savelle.

Prehistoric Thule Inuit in the Canadian Arctic were pre-eminent whalers, focussing on the bowhead whale, the largest prey species hunted by any prehistoric or historic hunter-gatherer society. The ethnographic literature provides a rich source of information dealing not only with the importance of bowheads in the diet of early historic bowhead-hunting Inuit societies, but also how social structure, ritual, symbolism and ideology were all centered on complex Thule-bowhead relationships. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trond Meling.

The red deer is one of the most common motifs at several Late Mesolithic rock carving sites along the coast of southern Norway. It is assumed that this animal was both an important food resource as well as an object of rituals and religious beliefs during this period. The focus of this paper will be to examine how the red deer appears in different contexts at settlement sites during the Stone Age, and to explore how these contexts reflect diverse activities, including rituals and ceremonies. Our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genevieve LeMoine.

Miniature carvings recovered from Paleo-Inuit Dorset culture sites (2800-700 BP) across the Canadian Arctic and northwestern Greenland offer tantalizing glimpses of human-animal relations of this prehistoric group. Recently scholars such as Matt Betts and Mari Hardenberg have begun a productive line of inquiry drawing on representational ecology to contextualize and enrich understanding of the social nature of these relationships and the symbolic role of the carvings of polar bears in particular...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Hill.

The use of personal amulets appears to have been a common practice among northern hunting peoples of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Many of these amulets were intended to facilitate individual human relations with sea mammals. Cooperative whaling, however, required the development of an amulet that mediated group relations with prey. This paper describes a set of Alaska Eskimo whaling "charms" dated to the late 19th century and identified in museum collections from across the United States. The...