Reimagining Human-Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North

Although relations among northern peoples and animals have conventionally been approached ecologically and economically, the emergence of human-animal studies suggests a reframing of these relations as equally social, experiential and meaningful. Nonhuman animals, in turn, are recognized as having complex social and cognitive lives and interspecies interactions of their own. An extraordinary northern zooarchaeological record speaks not only to the processing and consumption of animals but to the labour and violence to which domesticates were subjected, and to the biological unfolding of all animals’ lives as registered in their tissues. There is also a thick record of technologies related to the harvesting, harnessing and utilization of animals, and depictions of animals and human-animal relations in figurative art. The ethnographic, ethnohistoric, oral historic and ethnoarchaeological records further provide access to ethnozoological discourses and practices related to animal use and animality. This session draws together archaeologists working in various parts of the circumpolar north to think through the record of human-animal relations in novel ways. How did variously positioned actors in different times and places conceptualize and relate socially to nonhuman animals, and how did nonhuman animals relate to their world, including humans and other animals, in an archaeologically visible manner?