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Toward a Social Archaeology of Food for Hunters and Gatherers in Marginal Environments: a Case Study from the Eastern Subarctic of North America

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Abstract

The archaeology of hunters and gatherers has long focused on the economic and technological dimensions of food use and procurement. In marginal environments especially, hunter-gatherer food use has often been situated within an adaptationist calculus of survival and environmental accommodation. The ethnographic record of hunter-gatherers that inhabited such environments, however, indicate that social and cultural considerations also critically informed indigenous peoples’ procurement, consumption, and discard practices. Drawing on the later prehistoric and early historic archaeological record of the island of Newfoundland, in northeastern Canada, this paper explores how the procurement, consumption, and handling of subarctic foods conveyed identity, reflected historical conditions and social relations, factored into ritual and ceremonial practice, and embodied worldviews.

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Notes

  1. Faunal identifications derive from the literature only; they have not been independently assessed. Additionally, with the aim of being comprehensive and so as to help steer future researchers to unstudied faunal assemblages, I have included all late prehistoric indigenous sites that have yielded any faunal material, even if these assemblages have not been analyzed or are recorded as consisting of only unidentifiable remains (i.e., bone mash). Finally, as animal foods dominated the diet of Newfoundland’s indigenous peoples, I do not discuss evidence for the use of plant foods. For a discussion of the Beothuk use of plants for foods and raw materials, see Deal and Butt (2002).

  2. Avian species and family identifications (see Table 1) have been collapsed into a single bird category.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tom Andrews, Laura Halfyard, Cyr Couturier, Steve Hull, Chris Wolff, and John Erwin, who have all helped in various ways. I am especially appreciative of Moira McCaffrey, and three anonymous reviewers, for their close reading and critical comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Todd Kristensen is responsible for the wonderful illustrations.

Funding

Excavations at Birchy Lake were supported by an Eastern Illinois University research stipend (awarded to Donald H. Holly), and faunal analysis by a grant from the research office at MacEwan University (awarded to Paul Prince). Excavations at Stock Cove have been generously funded by the National Science Foundation, Arctic Social Science Program (awarded to Donald H. Holly Jr. and Christopher Wolff; awards 1011781; 1522977, 1640962).

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    Donald H. Holly Jr

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Holly, D.H. Toward a Social Archaeology of Food for Hunters and Gatherers in Marginal Environments: a Case Study from the Eastern Subarctic of North America. J Archaeol Method Theory 26, 1439–1469 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-019-09415-z

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