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

• Main Author: Ebel, Erika
• Other Authors: Darwent, Christyann M
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: eScholarship, University of California 2023
• Subjects: Archaeology; Arctic; Auk; Hunter-gatherers; Inuit; Late Dorset; Zooarchaeology; Davidson; Etah; Greenland; Inglefield Land; Johansen; arctic small tool tradition; Dovekie; Inglefield land; Inughuit; inuit
• Online Access: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8876354n

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). Because 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 ...