Bear/Human Relationships in Southeastern Native North America: Creating Archaeological Models from Historical Accounts

Summary

Historical accounts and ethnographic studies of the Indians of greater southeastern North America dating from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries contain abundant information on native people’s attitudes toward black bears (Ursus americanus). These records provide a basis for inferences about changes in subsistence exploitation of bear populations in the Southeast over the last five centuries, while offering clues about longer-term non-subsistence relationships between bears and humans that developed over millennia. The unique roles of bears as liminal beings—at times other-than-human, a third gender, intermediaries between plants and animals—have barely been explored by archaeologists. Rethinking bears from southeastern Native North American perspectives opens new lines of inquiry for archaeologists.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• An Other-Than-Human Being: The Archaeology of Bears in North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14397