Papers by Peter Whitridge
The Use of Aerial Drones to Map, Monitor, and Analyze Inuit Sites in Northern Labrador
The 86th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2021
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Mar 1, 2001
Despite fish bone being rare in even the best preserved Classic Thule Inuit (ca. A.D. 1000 -1400)... more Despite fish bone being rare in even the best preserved Classic Thule Inuit (ca. A.D. 1000 -1400) faunal assemblages from the Canadian Arctic, it has often been assumed that fish played an important role in Thule economies. This is due to the prominent place of fishing in the harvesting practices of the Historic Inuit and the ubiquity of fishing implements in Thule artifact assemblages. Based on an evaluation of potential taphonomic, sampling, and interpretive biases and the artifactual and zooarchaeological evidence for harvesting of sea mammals, land mammals, fish, and birds, it appears that fishing was of generally limited importance in the eastern parts of the Canadian Arctic and before about A.D. 1400, likely due to resource scheduling conflicts. The nonetheless widespread occurrence of fishing gear invites consideration of alternative scenarios for the place of fishing in Thule society, in which a minor dietary role is not inconsistent with important cultural roles.
PLOS ONE, Dec 13, 2023
Archaeological faunal remains provide key insights into human societies in the past, alongside in... more Archaeological faunal remains provide key insights into human societies in the past, alongside information on previous resource utilisation and exploitation of wildlife populations. The great whales (Mysticete and sperm whales) were hunted unsustainably throughout the 16th -20th centuries (herein defined as the modern period) leading to large population declines and variable recovery patterns among species. Humans have utilised whales as a resource through carcass scavenging for millennia; however, increasing local and regional ethnographic and archaeological evidence suggests that, prior to the modern period, hunting of the great whales was more common than previously thought; impacts of earlier hunting pressures on the population ecology of many whale species remains relatively unknown. Hunting guided by traditional ecological knowledge may have been sustainable and likely originated in societies that also incorporated opportunistic use of stranded individuals. The collation of georeferenced zooarchaeological data of the great whales between the 1st -20th centuries CE worldwide will provide insight into the timescale and distribution of resource utilisation of the great whales and how this varied within and between societies, and may have changed over time. By comparing regions of known resource utilisation and breeding and feeding grounds of current-day whale populations, this information will subsequently be used to infer regions where whale populations were possibly lost or extirpated prior to detailed historical records. This systematic review protocol also provides a template for archaeologists, ecologists, and historians interested in using faunal remains to infer historical ecology and resource use of wild animal populations. The transparency of our data collection approach provides opportunities for reproducibility and comparability with future datasets.
Invented Places: Environmental Imaginaries and the Inuit Colonization of Labrador
University of Manitoba Press eBooks, May 10, 2012
The Hillside Site, St. Lawrence Island, Alaska: An Examination of Collections from the 1930s. Don E. Dumond. 1998. University of Oregon Anthropological Papers No. 55, University of Oregon, Portland, vi + 199 pp., 15 figures, 29 plates, 17 tables, 3 appendices, references. $15.00 (paper)
American Antiquity, Oct 1, 2000
Journal of Archaeological Science, Dec 1, 1997
Formulae for estimating the age and sex of caribou are derived from measurements taken from a con... more Formulae for estimating the age and sex of caribou are derived from measurements taken from a control sample of caribou mandibles collected by the Canadian Wildlife Service. A robust linear relationship was found to exist between first molar crown height and age, while male and female mandibular measurements are statistically distinguishable on either side of a linear regression line. The application of these formulae to three 19th century archaeological assemblages from the western Canadian Arctic indicates their usefulness in estimating the age and sex of fossil populations, although some problems due to geographical variability remain. Tentative results indicate that traditional western Arctic Inuit were unable to exert strong control over the age and sex of the caribou they killed, perhaps because of the use of large-scale communal hunting techniques. This situation seems to have changed radically with the introduction of firearms in the 1870s.
International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 2002
Recent research has demonstrated that patterning related to harvesting selectivity and architectu... more Recent research has demonstrated that patterning related to harvesting selectivity and architectural bone utilization persists in the surface distribution of bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) bones at classic Thule sites in the Canadian central Arctic, despite scavenging by later non-whaling Inuit groups. Since skeletal riders with minimal architectural or artifactual utility are associated with carcass portions that were socially and ritually prized ethnographically in North Alaska, this surface record may also preserve spatial structure relating to loci of high status settlement and/or ceremonial activity within sites. Close to 3400 bowhead bones were mapped at the major Thule winter village of Qariaraqyuk, southeast Somerset Island. The results of a principal components analysis of the element distributions are consistent with expectations for special treatment of bowhead flippers, tails, and tongues. These results are supported by excavation data which reveal that flipper and tongue bones were preferentially discarded in the vicinity of wealthy whaling households and a major ceremonial structure. Contrary to the longstanding belief that Thule whale bone assemblages are hopelessly compromised by prehistoric and historic bone transport, these assemblages hold great promise for investigating Thule social and ritual practices.
University of Calgary Press eBooks, Oct 10, 2018
Hunting the largest animals: native whaling in the western Arctic and subarctic. Allen P. McCartney (Editor). 1995. Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute, University of Alberta (Occasional Publication 36). xii + 345 p, illustrated, soft cover. ISBN 0-919058-95-7
Polar Record, 1998
Manufacturing reality: Inuit harvesting depictions and the domestication of human-animal relations
The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2017
Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 2005
The prehistory of Inuit and Yupik whale use
Revista de arqueología americana, 1999
Page 1. THE PREHISTORY OF INUIT AND YUPIK WHALE USE Peter WHITRIDGE* Abstract Bowheads (Balaena m... more Page 1. THE PREHISTORY OF INUIT AND YUPIK WHALE USE Peter WHITRIDGE* Abstract Bowheads (Balaena mysticetus) and other large baleen whales have been part of Inuit and Yupik maritime harvesting economies for over 1000 years. The po ...
The source of meteoritic iron in Thule Inuit and Dorset culture artifacts from the Canadian Arctic
Abstracts with Programs - Geological Society of America, May 15, 1998
Ambiguous beings: the ontological autonomy of Inuit dogs
The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2016
Arctic, Jul 7, 2017
Archaeologists approach their evidence at numerous scales, from the intercontinental distribution... more Archaeologists approach their evidence at numerous scales, from the intercontinental distributions of people and their things to the microscopic structure in a thin section. This is possible and worthwhile, in part, because people in the past also acted in, and conceived of, their worlds at a variety of scales. The precontact Inuit record reveals not only large-scale regional networks and intricate site structures, but also the diminutive worlds depicted in toys, amulets, and figurative art. The human body was the most popular object of this miniaturization discourse, and it served to anchor the fractal-like proliferation of imagined worlds in everyday bodily experience.
Wrapping the Body
Arctic Anthropology
Marking the Land, 2016
Inuit households moved through a complex and far-flung annual round, and individuals travelled ev... more Inuit households moved through a complex and far-flung annual round, and individuals travelled even more widely, in pursuit of game and other resources, for trading opportunities and social contacts, to learn about the local landscape and monitor its changes, and as part of an ongoing personal, spiritual engagement with the world. The igluviak or snow house so emblematic of Eastern Arctic groups – a sophisticated winter travel structure that required practiced skills and technical environmental knowledge, though little in the way of equipment or raw materials beyond a snow knife and a snowdrift – neatly embodies this style of land use. In fact, a capacity for mobility was embedded in virtually every facet of Inuit culture. Portable travel technologies (including situational ones, assembled on the spot like the igluviak) involved an elaborate array of seasonally appropriate vehicles (including domesticated animals to provide traction), tools, clothing, knowledge and skills. Durable place markers – inuksuit – oriented travelers as they moved along trails or followed learned travel routes, and a network of semantically-dense place names archived spatial and historical information in a readily memorable form. The rapidity and spatial scale of Inuit exploration and colonization during the first few centuries of expansion out of the western Canadian Arctic (roughly AD 1200-1500) are particularly exceptional. The archaeological record reveals a sophisticated body of travel technologies and epistemologies – an Inuit ethnogeography - that have continued to evolve as novel things and practices (motorized transport, telecommunications, GIS, etc.) have been taken onboard. Travel remains at the heart of Inuit culture.
Publikationsansicht. 56690001. The construction of social difference in a prehistoric Inuit whali... more Publikationsansicht. 56690001. The construction of social difference in a prehistoric Inuit whaling community / (2000). Whitridge, Peter James. Abstract. Doct. Phil.--Arizona state university, 1999.. Bibliogr. p. 361-409. Details der Publikation. ...
Ambiguous beings: the ontological autonomy of Inuit dogs
While the survival of ancient parietal art to the present implies that numerous individuals may h... more While the survival of ancient parietal art to the present implies that numerous individuals may have viewed it, much occurs in such concealed or difficult to access locations (caves, rockshelters, cliff faces) that it seems rather to have been addressed to a small and esoteric community. The frequent superimposition of images also hints at a closed community of viewers, in that only those who were ongoing participants in the discourse would be conversant with its earlier iterations. This is analogous to contemporary graffiti, which is often situated in inaccessible locations, employs esoteric conventions, and characteristically overwrites earlier panels. Although the motives for contemporary graffiti production seem far removed from those of ancient rock art, these resemblances suggest underlying practical, structural and-arguably-ontological commonalities among at least some of these disparate forms of parietal marking. We take "ontologies" here to refer to the culturally, socially and practically configured understandings of the world that informed the thoughts and actions of the communities of artists who produced parietal art (including graffiti). While there is of course no reason to suspect any inherent cultural commonality amongst them, we assert that the act of engaging in a socially targeted visual discourse (i.e., a common purpose) by applying tools or pigments to found surfaces (i.e., a common medium) in concealed and peripheral locations (i.e., a common setting) leads parietal artists to share real practical affordances and visual understandings that amount to seams of ontological resemblance and overlap amongst the historical networks defined by community-artist-pigment-surface-setting associations. To illustrate this, we take up a body of contemporary graffiti at the abandoned Cold War military installation of Red Cliff, near St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, that began to emerge about a decade ago, and continues to evolve as new pieces obscure the old. This case reveals a number of interesting graffiti features, some of which are homologous with rock art. In the first place the graffiti instantiates a "community of discourse," or really numerous intersecting ontological communities that read and interpret the imagery based on a set of mutually understood discursive conventions, and
Uploads
Papers by Peter Whitridge