Erica Hill

An increasing number of archaeologists are incorporating insights from human–animal studies into their reconstructions of the human past. Much of this work, like several chapters in this volume, begins with the basic data of zooarchaeology—the species present at a site, their proportional representation, and their depositional contexts. But the animals in these assemblages were much more than economic resources—they led active lives in the past—as agents, co-domesticates, co-workers, and companions; as deities, ancestors, and the spirits of the dead; as ritual helpers and scapegoats for illness or misfortune, and even as living spaces in the cases of whales (Habu and Savelle 1994; Patton and Savelle 2006) and mammoths (Pryor et al. 2020). Animals also functioned in utilitarian terms, employed by humans to negotiate status and identity, to mediate gendered labor relations, and to manifest hunting prowess and political power. Often, the entangled lives of humans and animals involved oscillation between ontological subjectivity and objectivity, depending on the task, location, and social context. A nineteenth-century Inuit puppy might take the role of a lost human child, coddled and petted as a member of the family, in the winter become a sled dog subject to the needs of a human caretaker, only to regain autonomy in the summer, scavenging and roaming at will; its fur might ultimately trim a parka.

This volume provides fresh insight into northern human–animal relations and illustrates the breadth and practical utility of archaeological human–animal studies. It surveys recent archaeological research in northern North America and Eurasia that frames human–animal relations as not merely economically exploitative but often socially complex and deeply meaningful, and attuned to the intelligence and agency of nonhuman prey and domesticates. The case studies sample a wide swath of the circumpolar region, from Alaska, Nunavut, and Greenland to northern Fennoscandia and western Siberia, and span sites, finds, and scenarios ranging in age from the Mesolithic to the twenty-first century. Many taxa on which northern lives hinged figure in these analyses, including large marine mammals, polar bear, reindeer, marine fish, and birds, and are variously approached from relational, multispecies, semiotic, osteobiographical, and political economic perspectives. Animals themselves are represented by osteological remains, harvesting gear, and depictions of animal bodies that include zoomorphic figurines, petroglyphs, ornamentation, and intricate portrayals of human–animal harvesting encounters. Far from settling the problem of how archaeologists should approach northern human–animal relations, these chapters reveal the irreducible complexity of northern worlds and highlight the diversity of human and nonhuman animal lives. This book will be of particular interest to northern archaeologists and zooarchaeologists, and all those interested in the possibilities of a multispecies approach to the archaeological record.

The use of personal amulets appears to have been a common practice among northern hunting peoples of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Many of these amulets were intended to facilitate individual human relations with sea mammals (e.g., LeMoine et al., this volume). Cooperative whaling, however, required the development of an amulet that mediated group relations with prey. This chapter describes a set of Iñupiaq whaling “charms” from Alaska dated to the late nineteenth century and identified in museum collections across the United States. The charms, actually seats or cross-pieces for umiat (large skin boats), represented idealized whales and were intended to flatter, attract, and secure this key prey species. As part of the material culture of whaling, umiaq seats representing whales played a mediating role in a complex relational network that included the whaling captain, his wife, crew, the bowhead, the watercraft, and the village community. Following description of this relational network and its key agents, this chapter concludes with the implications for archaeology and a synthetic discussion of the “extended sociality” that characterized Iñupiaq relations with animals and material culture