Osteobiography of an ancient ‘woolly’ dog from Tseshaht territory on western Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Dogs in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The wool dog is a precontact breed of domesticated dog that has held specific cultural importance within Indigenous communities on the coast of British Columbia and Washington for thousands of years. Although wool dogs no longer persist as a distinct breed on the Northwest Coast, information about these dogs is retained in ethnohistorical records and archaeological heritage sites. This presentation focuses on a dog burial excavated from the ancient Tseshaht village of Kakmakimilh in Barkley Sound, western Vancouver Island, broadly consistent with the Nuu-chah-nulth variant of the “wool dog.” We present a zooarchaeological analysis of the burial and isotopic modeling results to gain perspective on this dog’s health and treatment in life and death. Combining cultural information about Indigenous dogs and zooarchaeological research enables deeper insight into how precontact wool dogs were kept and cared for within Tseshaht communities and other Nuu-chah-nulth communities on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Dogs in the Archaeological Record   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36620.0