Anna C. Sloan

Doctoral Student in Anthropology

Birds, Subsistence, and Gender at Deering

My Masters project centered on the many ways that Western Thule and Ipiutak peoples living at Deering, Alaska between the 8th and 13th centuries AD utilized birds for subsistence purposes, and the likelihood that these practices were linked with notions of spirituality and gender.

Bird humeral fragment from the Deering site showing a groove mark, which may be related to needle manufacture.

Bird humeral fragment from the Deering site showing a groove mark, which may be related to needle manufacture.

Through examining over 1,200 bird bone specimens from the Deering site (49KTZ299, 49KTZ300) for elemental representations and cut marks, I determined that Ipiutak and Western Thule families were butchering birds for food, carving and cutting their bones into needles and other tools, and using their skins to make garments like parkas. To understand what these bird subsistence practices might have meant to the pre-contact peoples that practiced them, I explored ethnographic data on bird subsistence from across the Arctic, finding that many northern Indigenous communities associate birds with qualities of spiritual transformation. In addition, I found that Indigenous women played a major role in bird subsistence practices, making birds into meals to feed their families,  removing and processing the animals’ skins, and then utilizing bird bone needles to transform these skins into a variety of garments that were simultaneously warm, beautiful, and symbolically evocative.

Bird cranial fragment from the Deering site exhibiting scrape marks, likely from skinning.

Bird cranial fragment from the Deering site exhibiting scrape marks, likely from skinning.

This research demonstrates that subsistence is a multifaceted thing that should not be thought of in purely functional terms. My Masters project is part of a growing movement in zooarchaeology to attend to the less tangible dimensions of subsistence practices in the past, like gender and spirituality.

In 2014, I published an article on this research in Arctic Anthropology, which you can find here.

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