Precontact Inuit Watercraft and the Hunter-Prey Actantial Hinge

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Maritime harvesting from watercraft and sea ice was the foundation of precontact Inuit economy throughout the Eastern Arctic, and small watercraft also figured in locally important terrestrial caribou hunts. Boats were everywhere essential to work, travel, and trade during the open water season. Although the body of ancient figurative art depicting boating is slim, a number of representations exist of crewed umiaks (umiat) and kayaks (qajat) employed on the water in the course of harvesting bowhead whales and caribou. This represents a significant condensation of the actual breadth of activities surrounding boat use, which included collecting driftwood for the frame, procuring and processing hides for boat covers, manufacturing and covering the frame, producing hunting equipment, engaging in social and ritual activities attendant on cooperative hunting, logistically mounting and prosecuting the harvest, processing and transporting game, distributing resultant animal products within the community, voyaging to seasonal trade fairs, and moving camp. Rather than a “flat” actor-network of equally meaningful nodes and linkages, precontact Inuit depicted, and presumably imagined, the extraordinarily complex entailments of watercraft use in terms of a singularly meaningful actantial hinge—boat-borne hunters encountering swimming prey—implying an ontology premised on this repeated moment of encounter.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35704.0