Sacrifice of slaves among the Tlingit Indians, who lived in southeastern Alaska, had a ritual character and was part of their traditional culture. Slaves were sacrificed during special ceremonies—potlaches. Initially, the Russians, coming into the lands of the Tlingit at the end of the 18th century, did not interfere in their customs or try to prevent ritual slayings. Only at the end of the 1810s, when rather well-educated and humane naval officers took command in the Russian colonies in America, were attempts undertaken to ease the lot of the doomed slaves. Russian missionaries also played a definite role in keeping the Tlingit from ritual slaying. Of course, the Russians' campaign, as well as the ransom of the slaves and prohibition against killing them at the walls of the colonial capital Novo-Arkhangel'sk, exerted influence primarily on the Tlingit living in the vicinity of the community of Sitka. Nevertheless, due to the endeavors of the Russians, several dozen people were saved from death. Resistance to human sacrifice among the Tlingit became one of the specific aspects of the social policy of the colonial administration, influencing in some ways the character of Russian-Tlingit relations.

The distribution of food in space and time influences hunter-gatherer settlement and subsistence patterning in generalizable ways. In North Slope, Alaska, where caribou (Rangifer tarandus) are abundant annually in predictable locations, storage equalizes availability across relative scarcity. This study examined an assemblage of caribou long-bone specimens from an activity area at the Croxton archaeological site for evidence of mass processing for bone-marrow storage outside of the meal course as an indicator of production efficiency in an economy of scale. The archaeological faunal samples were compared on three criteria with ethnoarchaeological meal-midden and mass-processing model assemblages. The analysis indicated that the archaeological specimens are short and variable and are not biased toward marrow-rich skeletal elements, indicating that they probably resulted from meal middens and not from marrow massprocessing debris. The results of this study suggest that meal-based access to a full spectrum of nutrient sources was emphasized over efficiency in marrow extraction and storage in the archaeological faunal samples. This study demonstrates that analyzes of faunal remains based on models of subsistence organization can be useful in the development of perspectives about past food systems.

This study aims to reconstruct the dietary habits of a local group of the Northern (Upper Taz) Selkup in the 18th and 19th centuries based on multidisciplinary analyses of human interments from the Kikki-Akki burial site in Western Siberia and a study of unpublished written sources. It includes archaeoparasitological studies of soils adjacent to human remains, a paleopathological examination of human crania and teeth, and isotopic analysis of both human and animal organic samples to reconstruct dietary habits. Information on the inhabitants of the upper Taz River from documents of the 19th century was cross-checked. Bottom-feeding omnivorous and predatory fish were prevalent in the diet of all group members. All group members, including children, continually consumed raw fish or insufficiently cooked fish dishes. The change in the protein composition of the diet in autumn and early spring coincided with the hunting seasons of certain animals.

In this article, we explore the Inuit legend of the Inuk Qajuuttaq, employing an ethnohistorical, anthropological, and archaeological approach. Qajuuttaq’s legend takes place in South Greenland in the area of Narsaq around AD 1800. Our research concerns what the local population of the Narsaq area knows about Qajuuttaq and his history in 2018. Six people with knowledge about Qajuuttaq were interviewed. We document and analyze four sites connected to Qajuuttaq using archaeological methods. We conclude that important fragmentary knowledge about Qajuuttaq’s life and history exists today but that modern Inuit emphasize a very different meaning and morality about Qajuuttaq, compared to when the legend was written down in 1867. Our main point is that Inuit family legends are very important entries into Inuit history and prehistory, especially if the legends are analyzed in relation to the landscapes where they took place.

The sky is routinely overlooked in Northern Dene ethnology as a meaningful domain of linguistic and cultural knowledge. However, a decade of comparative ethnological research in Alaska and Canada has shown that Dene stellar knowledge is largely tied to sacred and covert knowledge systems. In this paper, we describe an Ahtna, Gwich’in, and Sahtúot’ı̨nę constellation identified as the incarnated spirit of an ancient Traveler-Transformer figure who circled the world in Distant Time. Although this Traveler is widely known in mythology, his enigmatic transformation to the sky embodies a specialized domain of knowledge rooted in the traditional beliefs and practices of medicine people. This “Traveler” constellation is not only a world custodian and arche-type of an idealized medicine person, but it is also a teacher, ally, gamekeeper, and the embodiment of the world. We identify variations of this constellation throughout the Northern Dene region.

Arctic archaeology suffers from a series of unfortunate conjunctures that make accurate and reliable dating of the prehistory of circumpolar North America problematic. Through the late-prehistoric Yup’ik site of Nunalleq, this paper explores a novel approach to dating archaeological sites in the circumpolar north. Presenting data from a peat sequence associated with the archaeological site, we examine if a combination of paleoenvironmental analyses (new insect, plant macrofossil and macroscopic charcoal data, and previously published palynological data), radiocarbon dating, and Bayesian modeling can generate high-resolution chronologies for archaeological sites. The results indicate that archaeological events are resolvable in the paleoenvironmental record and that the timing of such events illustrates a striking concordance with those derived from archaeological data. This paper highlights and recommends how paleoenvironmental analyses can be deployed towards improving the chronologies of Inuit and pre-Inuit archaeology.

In this paper, I explore the socioeconomic relationships between Alaska Native harvesting practices, the laws that regulate those practices, and Alaska Native art. In the 21st century, indigenous residents of northwestern Alaska incorporate harvesting activities into their travels between small rural communities, regional centers, and larger Alaskan cities. These harvests efficiently coordinate their nutritional and cultural needs but require significant financial investments. State and federal “subsistence” laws were intended to regulate and protect Alaska Native hunting and fishing ways of life but hinder them in two ways. Subsistence laws prohibit financial gains from harvested foods and restrict hunting and fishing to specific locations. I argue that in the face of these regulatory challenges, Alaska Natives, in part, make and sell art as a way to ameliorate the disparities between subsistence laws and harvesting practices.

Housing architecture can be regarded as both a product of culture and a medium that can influence change in a society. The relationship between identity and identification can be a source of conflict between architects, planners, and designers and those who must live with the designs. The Skolt Sámi have traditionally lived in the borderland area between Finland, Russia, and Norway. Some Skolt villages were remote from the interests of authorities until the early 20th century. They had retained their seminomadic way of life in which they changed dwelling places according to the yearly cycle. In this article, I focus on how Finnish housing ideology finally influenced Skolts’ life and culture in Suenjel Village (after resettling, called Sevettijärvi).

Among the Inuit of the eastern Arctic, where hunting remains one of the foundations of society, humans have long cohabited with the wolf (<i>amaruq</i>). It holds a special place among animals known to the Inuit and is closely associated with the bear, the dog, and especially the wolverine. The wolf no longer arouses fear. It is merely distrusted, due to its characteristics. It is perceived as a large predator that competes directly with humans, and it is still strongly associated with the world of spirits, who can take on its form to attack humans. Thus, although the wolf no longer occupies an important place in shamanism, it still harbors spirits that humans prefer to avoid meeting. Inuit elders preserve many stories about wolves.

Introduction to a special volume of Arctic Anthropology. This introduction discusses the use and abuse of Arctic peoples for archaeological and anthropological analogy in the study of hunter-gatherers.