The Beaver of Children and the Poor: The Social Dimension of Fur-Bearing Mammal Exploitation in Central British Columbia

Summary

The intensive Historic Period exploitation of beaver and other fur-bearing mammals, especially those that are small bodied, has typically been seen as a fur trade phenomena that can be explained in terms of optimizing returns of both material capital and prestige represented by European goods through the use of more efficient technologies introduced by Europeans. If this were strictly the case, we might expect to find a greater representation of the remains of beaver and small fur-bearers in Historic Period Indigenous archaeological sites than we do in Prehistoric contexts, but such comparisons are rarely undertaken. An analysis of faunal assemblages from contexts spanning the last millennium on the Nechako Plateau of central British Columbia is presented here and demonstrates that beaver and other fur-bearers were a ubiquitous part of people’s prey choices. I argue that, in the long-term, the place of these animals in the diet and culture of the area is better explained in terms of their potential social values than as strictly a matter of economic optimization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Toward a Social Archaeology of Food in Northern North America

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14561