Abstract
Sagan-Zaba II, a habitation site on the shore of Siberia’s Lake Baikal, contains a record of seal hunting that spans much of the Holocene, making it one of the longest histories of seal use in North Asia. Zooarchaeological analyses of the 16,000 Baikal seal remains from this well-dated site clearly show that sealing began here at least 9000 calendar years ago. The use of these animals at Sagan-Zaba appears to have peaked in the Middle Holocene, when foragers used the site as a spring hunting and processing location for yearling and juvenile seals taken on the lake ice. After 4800 years ago, seal use declined at the site, while the relative importance of ungulate hunting and fishing increased. Pastoralists began occupying Sagan-Zaba at some point during the Late Holocene, and these groups too utilized the lake’s seals. Domesticated animals are increasingly common after about 2000 years ago, a pattern seen elsewhere in the region, but spring and some summer hunting of seals was still occurring. This use of seals by prehistoric herders mirrors patterns of seal use among the region’s historic and modern groups. Overall, the data presented in the paper demonstrate that Lake Baikal witnessed thousands of years of human use of aquatic resources.
Highlights
People and seals have formed long-lasting relationships in many parts of the world
Numerous Holocene archaeological sites have been found around the lake, with many of the earliest ones located along its southwest shoreline
Middle Holocene layers VB-A and IVB-A are very distinct in terms of spatial patterning of seal remains when compared to other site layers
Summary
People and seals have formed long-lasting relationships in many parts of the world. This is especially true in the north, where these animals are a major part of societies’ economies and overall well-being, both presently and in the distant past [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. The vast majority of the analyzed canines were from poorly documented contexts, most of which were only typologically dated, and none of the sites from which the teeth were excavated were sieved, almost certainly resulting in faunal assemblages biased towards the remains from large fauna. To address these shortcomings, the Baikal Archaeology Project (centered at University of Alberta, Canada) carried out excavations from 2006–2008 at the Sagan-Zaba II habitation site on the western shore of the lake (Fig 1). Sagan-Zaba II provides the best currently available dataset with which long term human interactions with Baikal seals can be explored, and perhaps the longest and most extensive record of seal use from a single location within North Asia
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