Peter Whitridge

Archaeological faunal remains provide key insights into human societies in the past, alongside information on previous resource utilisation and exploitation of wildlife populations. The great whales (Mysticete and sperm whales) were hunted unsustainably throughout the 16th - 20th centuries (herein defined as the modern period) leading to large population declines and variable recovery patterns among species. Humans have utilised whales as a resource through carcass scavenging for millennia; however, increasing local and regional ethnographic and archaeological evidence suggests that, prior to the modern period, hunting of the great whales was more common than previously thought; impacts of earlier hunting pressures on the population ecology of many whale species remains relatively unknown. Hunting guided by traditional ecological knowledge may have been sustainable and likely originated in societies that also incorporated opportunistic use of stranded individuals. The collation of georeferenced zooarchaeological data of the great whales between the 1st - 20th centuries CE worldwide will provide insight into the timescale and distribution of resource utilisation of the great whales and how this varied within and between societies, and may have changed over time. By comparing regions of known resource utilisation and breeding and feeding grounds of current-day whale populations, this information will subsequently be used to infer regions where whale populations were possibly lost or extirpated prior to detailed historical records. This systematic review protocol also provides a template for archaeologists, ecologists, and historians interested in using faunal remains to infer historical ecology and resource use of wild animal populations. The transparency of our data collection approach provides opportunities for reproducibility and comparability with future datasets.

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.

Schematic harvesting scenes incised on tools are a stock variety of both precontact and historical Inuit graphic art. They sometimes seem to depict specific events, which they effectively commemorate, and have real (sometimes precise) informational content that must have been important for the dissemination of technical harvesting knowledge among a hunter’s peers, and its inter-generational transfer. However, the harvesting setups – a boatload of hunters on the verge of harpooning a whale, an archer about to release an arrow toward a caribou – are rather conventional, even repetitive, suggesting that these depictions also acted to discursively stabilize particular sorts of relations among people, things, the environment, and nonhuman animals. This may have been an intended function, along the lines of a hunting amulet, or it may have been an unconscious effect achieved through the eidetic citation of an idealized turn of events. Although scenes of harvesting walrus, seals, caribou, birds, and other species occur in this idiom, bowhead whaling was clearly the object of a special fascination. Whaling scenes are the most conventional of all, condensing these various functions – historical, educational, and symbolic – as whales were engaged in a discourse on human–animal relations that embraced ritual, belief, memory, social relations, technology, and economy.