The Intensification of Indigenous Sealing in Southeast Alaska: A 19th Century Camp Complex at Yakutat Bay

Summary

Late 19th century harbor seal hunting among the glacial ice floes at the head of Yakutat Bay attracted hundreds of Tlingit, Eyak, and Tsimshian participants who harvested thousands of seals, an annual congregation of indigenous peoples that exceeded any other in southeast Alaska. The extraordinary scale of this communal, clan-mediated enterprise by the 1870s derived in part from the abundance of seals at Yakutat and subsistence demand (especially for seal oil) but appears to have been increased by the availability of guns and a new commercial market for seal products. Extensive archaeological data from the Smithsonian Institution’s NSF-funded Yakutat Seal Camps Project (2011-2014) are joined with Yakutat oral narratives, indigenous knowledge of seal ecology, archival sources, and camp photographs from the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition to reconstruct this post-contact trade and hunting pattern.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage