Topography as a Dimension of Settlement in the Caribou Inuit Homeland

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hunting for Hunters, Underwater: Results and Future Directions for Submerged Ancient Sites" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Caribou Inuit on the Canadian tundra camped where the barrenground caribou were expected to come – on migratory routes, especially at crossings on the Kazan River in the summer and fall. Camp locations were subject to change from year to year, even though many places are considered ‘traditional’ and some are associated with large archaeological sites today. Spring crossings depended on river ice and open water conditions. Fall crossings depended on weather and wind direction, changing if the animals thought wolves or people awaited them. Because of this uncertainty, a family might be at different locations along the course of the river annually. More reliable, perhaps, was a tendency to move seasonally between high and low places -- hills in spring, anticipating the arrival of caribou from the forest, and the shoreline in summer and fall, where caribou, crossing from the opposite shore, now going south, were intercepted. In this way, topography, even subtle differences in elevation, may be a predictor of seasonal settlement. To evaluate this proposition, I consider how different types of features associated with seasonal activities, are distributed at different elevations across the landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Hunting for Hunters, Underwater: Results and Future Directions for Submerged Ancient Sites

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51076