Interpreting High Arctic Subsistence: A Zooarchaeological Investigation of Late Dorset and Inuit Fauna and Osseous Technology at Iita, NW Greenland

The archaeological site of Iita in Inglefield Land, northwestern Greenland is situated within a coastal environment that has relatively high biological productivity for the High Arctic and therefore supports a diverse array of Arctic fauna which, consequently, has attracted Indigenous peoples for millennia. Iita (Etah) is also well known in Arctic exploration literature, as it was home to an Inughuit community employed by several Arctic expeditions in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Located near a large colony of seabirds known to have been exploited by the Inughuit community, it has been suggested that the presence of this large dovekie colony may have influenced the history of human settlement in the region (Darwent and Johansen 2010; Davidson et al. 2018). The rare formation of several unmixed stratigraphic layers corresponding to consecutive occupations by two distinct foraging groups at Iita presents a novel opportunity to observe changes in the use of animal resources through time. The first recorded inhabitants of this site were the Late Dorset whose material culture is the terminal manifestation of the Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt). The Late Dorset have no known cultural or genetic descendants (Raghavan et al. 2014) and it has been suggested that the arrival of a new foraging people may be related to the demise of the Late Dorset, although the nature of contact is still debated (Friesen 2000; Park 2016). Inuit, who are the pre-contact ancestors of the local Inughuit who live in the region today, were the second group to occupy Iita. Previous research has shown that these two cultures employed widely differing technologies, which should be reflected in their subsistence (Maxwell 1985).\nBecause non-animal sources of food and raw material are nearly absent in High Arctic Greenland, precolonial Indigenous peoples primarily relied on animal resources for their complete subsistence economy. One way to infer subsistence strategies of past cultures is by identifying and quantifying archaeological faunal remains. Examining faunal remains deposited by these two culturally distinct groups at Iita presents an opportunity to assess how various animal sources contributed to the subsistence lifeways of populations at this site.\nThis dissertation investigates resource use by examining two complimentary aspects of animal remains from archaeological midden deposits, including an assemblage processed for consumption and another assemblage of osseous debris produced from making tools out of various animal skeletal materials. The faunal remains recovered from excavations at Iita in 2012 and 2016 are associated with temporal/cultural contexts spanning nearly 1,000 years from the Late Dorset (10501250 CE) through to the Inughuit and Euroamerican periods (1850–1950 CE). This analysis provides the first, detailed investigation of Late Dorset subsistence practices and expands our current knowledge of precolonial Inuit subsistence practices at Iita. \nThis research suggests that despite both foraging groups having access to the same suite of animal resources, the two foraging groups living at Iita practiced distinct subsistence strategies. The broad differences between Late Dorset and Inuit societies stem from deviations in subsistence strategies and curated technologies such as the bow-and-arrow, dog sledges, and watercraft, which also influence subsistence choices. This research examines variation between the two groups while minimizing variability due to local environmental factors, an advantage associated with analyzing materials from a single archaeological site. This research contributes to our understanding of the persistence of Inuit and disappearance the Late Dorset and variation in human behavior more broadly.\n

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