From Omajuk to NiKik: The Variable Transformation of Animals into Social Things among the Historic Period Labrador Inuit

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological studies have conventionally regarded Inuit relationships to animals in terms of subsistence and food-getting, from seasonality and hunting strategies to calories of meat, fat, and marrow consumed. Inuit oral traditions and ethnographic sources, however, offer a richer narrative of subsistence than archaeologists have succeeded in portraying, one including the ideological significance of animals, their spiritual autonomy, and the multiple transformations of social meanings attached to animals during their appropriation, dismemberment, and disembodiment. This study will reexamine seal, dog, fox, and caribou bone across a set of historic period sites in Nunatsiavut (Labrador) in order to explore the potential of a social zooarchaeology of Inuit-animal interactions. As a starting point, differences in the treatment of live animals and postmortem treatment of carcasses related to butchery, food preparation, and other forms of exploitation were examined through comparisons of pathologies, cut marks, and other tool marks in assemblages from midden, house floor, and cache contexts, with different treatments clearly being accorded to different animals. These differences likely relate in part to functional variables such as anatomy and seasonality but also to conceptual distinctions between animals derived from ideology, habitus, and the introduction of commercial trapping and hunting practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32545