Thinking through Dogs in the Arctic
Author(s): Erica Hill
Year: 2015
Summary
Canids are among the most commonly encountered animals in archaeological assemblages worldwide. Using examples from the Arctic, I discuss some of the key ways that humans employ dogs to think about their relationships with other humans, animals, and the world around them. While dogs were often treated similar to human persons, they were also used to distance and distinguish "real people" from others. Ethnohistoric evidence suggests that a dynamic tension existed in the Arctic between humans and dogs. With this evidence in mind, I argue that the ubiquity of dogs at many archaeological sites reflects 1) the symbolic potentiality inherent in dog behavior; and 2) the ambivalence and fluidity of dog–human relations.
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Cite this Record
Thinking through Dogs in the Arctic. Erica Hill. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 395591)
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Spatial Coverage
min long: -178.41; min lat: 62.104 ; max long: 178.77; max lat: 83.52 ;