Abstract
This paper investigates human–animal interaction in two very different hunter-gatherer societies, Late Dorset and Thule Inuit, who once occupied the eastern Arctic (Canadian Arctic and Greenland). I focus on their disparate hunting technologies in order to achieve a nuanced understanding on how cultural factors influenced this relationship and to ultimately better understand why Late Dorset disappeared from the archeological record. I assess how hunting technologies impacted each society’s archaeofaunas and describe what appear to be culturally distinct trends in the faunal remains. In light of these findings, differences between Late Dorset and Thule Inuit hunting strategies, and other societal aspects including labor organization, hierarchy, and food provisioning are considered. This research discusses how generalized versus specialized hunting technologies impacted the social trajectory of each society, and methodologically, it provides a case study for how the use of specialized technologies can be viewed in the archeological record.
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Notes
Focal prey refers to caribou and fish at Iqaluktuuq and small seals at the Grinnell Peninsula and Smith Sound sites. Though arctic fox is the most frequent mammal at the Late Dorset Smith Sound site, its small size and less palatable meat suggests it was primary captured for its fur (Howse 2016).
Resources are ranked based on the number of calories used in their pursuit and processing and how many calories they provide (Bettinger 1991).
Radiocarbon dates from both H21 and H22, at the Skraeling Island site, were based on samples of heather. That from H21 yielded a date of 630 ± 60 bp, which calibrates to 1275–1415 ce at 2 sigma; the sample from H22 yielded a date of 790 ± 50 bp, which calibrates to 1154–1292 ce at 2 sigma (McCullough 1989:241). Both dates were corrected for C13/C12 ratios and calibrated with the program CALIB 7.1.
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Acknowledgements
The data for this article is derived from my doctoral dissertation. I am indebted to my doctoral advisor Max Friesen for his generous support and advice, and to Gary Coupland and David Smith for their guidance throughout my research. I also benefited from the insightful comments of the rest of my examination committee, Katherine Patton, Genevieve Dewar, and Bjarne Grønnow. I am very grateful to Robert Park, Karen McCullough, and Martin Appelt, as well as to the Canadian Museum of History, Greenland National Museum, and the Zoological Museum of Denmark for supporting my analysis of the Grinnell Peninsula and Smith Sound faunal collections. An Ontario Graduate scholarship funded part of my doctoral studies, the University of Toronto’s Research Travel Grant and the Department of Anthropology’s Preliminary Research Grant funded travel to Copenhagen to identify the faunal sample from Greenland, the Northern Scientific Training Program (Northern Development Canada) supported part of my work at the Bell site, and excavations at Iqaluktuuq were funded by a SSHRC received by M. Friesen. I owe many thanks to Adam Allentuck and Mari Kleist for their comments on an earlier draft of this article and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Thank-you to Michael O’Rourkewho made an earlier draft of Fig. 1. All errors are my own.
Funding
This study was in part funded by the Vonda McCrae Clarke Memorial Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the University of Toronto, the Northern Scientific Training Program (Northern Development Canada, Government of Canada), and a SSHRC awarded to Max Friesen.
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Howse, L. Hunting Technologies and Archaeofaunas: Societal Differences Between Hunter-Gatherers of the Eastern Arctic. J Archaeol Method Theory 26, 88–111 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-018-9366-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-018-9366-2