Shifting to Domesticates: Using Morphology and Genetic Analyses to Assess Birnirk and Thule Inuit Human-Canid Relationships

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Canids are essential actors in Alaskan Iñupiat societies. Recent studies have tracked the domestication of dogs in the Siberian Arctic. We also have a good understanding of human-dog interactions among late ancestral and contemporary Iñupiat. Our study provides data on the middle period, looking at canid remains associated with the Birnirk who migrated from Siberia, at the Cape Espenberg site (KTZ-304). We use estimates from measurements of canid elements to categorize canids as wild or domestic. We compare these bimodal results to genetic identifications to inform the accuracy of the morphometric methods. Both lines of evidence indicate that Birnirk people were interacting closely with both wild and domesticated canids at the site, which is distinct from the subsequent Thule occupation at the site where domestic dogs make up most of the canid remains. Our comparison of the canid-human relationships among Birnirk people to later Thule Inuit indicates a shift away from engaging closely with wild canids. We propose that human-canid interactions were transitioning from a limited use of domestics in the Birnirk period to a reliance on them in later Iñupiat periods. This corresponds to an increased presence of dog traction artifacts in the later periods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53880