Abstract
One relevant dimension through which human populations articulate their occupation of the landscape involves the accumulation and interpersonal transmission of information pertaining to the spatio-temporal distribution, accessibility, and desirability of resources. The high productivity and resource diversity of coastal circumpolar landscapes enables them to sustain larger hunter-gatherer populations throughout the year. In circumpolar landscapes, marine mammals are a particularly highly ranked resource, as major sources of essential fats, proteins, and other nutrients. The adoption of specialized toolkits for marine mammal exploitation in open waters, encompassing watercraft and detachable harpoons, would have ensured that marine mammal hunting was a particularly rewarding and predictable endeavor. The first consistent adoption of toggling harpoons in southwestern Alaska is documented primarily at the height of the cold Neoglacial (ca. 4500–2500 BP), mirroring trends along the western Bering Sea coast. While maritime resource exploitation in northwestern Alaska also appears to have begun during the Neoglacial—particularly in the Kotzebue Sound area—specialized technological adaptations reflecting full-time maritime adaptations became more prominent in the wider region during the subsequent warmer period, in the context of population growth and increasing social connectivity. In contrast, the appearance of detachable harpoons at sites in the Beagle Channel (southern Tierra del Fuego) does not appear to be associated with any significant climatic changes, developing locally around 6500 BP after an initial period of human settlement in the region which lacked such adaptations. Therefore, we argue that the pathways toward the adoption of specialized toolkits enabling a maritime-oriented subsistence strategy in circumpolar coastal environments emerged primarily as the outcome of the consolidation of knowledge networks derived from the habituation of hunter-gatherer-fisher communities to predictable ecological conditions during periods in which the coastal landscapes they inhabited had become relatively stable.
Highlights
The organization and subsistence strategies of past and present Indigenous communities around the world have long been a focus of academic research
We argue that assessing the cross-cultural nature of socio-economic organization of Holocene hunter-gatherer-fisher communities living in circumpolar landscapes may offer a broader and more nuanced understanding of the different pathways toward maritime-oriented adaptations
Given the shared links between the regions of the circumpolar north, we focus on the coastlines of western Alaska and southernmost South America, two historically unrelated and geographically-distant cultural sequences, to provide a more independent characterization of the different processes that may have been involved in the development of specialized toolkits for the hunting of pinnipeds and other marine mammals (Crockford and Frederick 2007; Fitzhugh 2016; McCartney 1975; Orquera 2005; Orquera and Piana 2009; Yesner 2004)
Summary
The organization and subsistence strategies of past and present Indigenous communities around the world have long been a focus of academic research. In an age of rapid climate change and major socio-economic transformations, people living in harsh circumpolar coastlines are facing a growing number of challenges: the melting of sea ice and glaciers are causing sea levels to rise and coastal erosion is increasing, factors which will conceivably lead to forced migrations into unfamiliar territories away from their ancestral lands (e.g., Maldonado et al 2013) In yet another exercise in cultural resilience— after having had to deal with the ravages of colonization—the local communities of western Alaska, informed by their historical experiences and their cumulative traditional knowledge, will have to continue developing novel settlement and subsistence strategies to cope with ongoing climatic and socio-economic changes (Sloan 2019). Subpolar Oceanic Climate (Cfc) Subarctic With Cool Summers and Year-Round Rainfall (Dfc) Dry Subarctic Climate (Dfc)
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