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.
The use of cannabis, narcotics, and other intoxicants is widespread within
North American prisons... more The use of cannabis, narcotics, and other intoxicants is widespread within North American prisons, where do-it-yourself instruments are fashioned, used, traded, discarded, and/or confiscated. This cycle contributes to the long-term record of material culture and provides an opportunity to study innovations employed by incarcerated persons. An assemblage of improvised devices for consuming illicit drugs (pipes, syringe, and decoys) from Her Majesty’s Penitentiary (HMP) in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, provides an opportunity to explore the culture of twentieth-century drug consumption at an exceptionally long-lived penal institution. The collection of drug paraphernalia dates between 1971 and 1983 and represents a palimpsest of curated items confiscated by correctional officers. By drawing upon actor-network theory and a folkloric approach to the material assemblage, we situate this local assemblage within the larger carceral context wherein individuals “make do.” These objects speak to longstanding and widely shared technological traditions, an accomplished do-it-yourself ethic amongst those incarcerated, and the complex entanglement of criminality, carceral practices, and drug use.
Exploring Ontologies of the Precontact Americas, 2024
Perhaps more than any other discrete material practice, the manner in which a society disposes of... more Perhaps more than any other discrete material practice, the manner in which a society disposes of its dead reveals its ontological drift. Although arguably of null importance for the individual concerned, mortuary rites provide an opportunity for the living to articulate, often in an exceptionally public and communal forum, their understandings of life, death, and the afterlife, reiterating the social identity of the deceased and his or her survivors and often installing some more or less durable memorial to carry this conversation forward. Reused cemeteries, crypts, and mounds come to represent vast corporeal archives of these long-running discourses on the local meaning of a human life. Although these settings have long interested mortuary archaeologists and bioarchaeologists, they should exert a particular pull on archaeologists interested in past local conceptualizations of being—ontologies— precisely because it seems that these conceptualizations cannot fail to be expressed in the treatment of the dead (although deciphering them will undoubtedly be challenging). What seems to be demanded is a dedicated attempt to unravel local understandings and experiences of dying, death, mortuary ritual, and the afterlife. But whereas bioarchaeology has been predominantly concerned with the recovery of information on the life of individuals (diet, mobility, work, injury, disease, cause of death, etc.), and mortuary archaeology with the practices associated with the handling of bodies at end of life, neither fully addresses wider conceptualizations of the person across a fully imagined life course that begins at conception and carries on past corporeal death, though each holds critical pieces of the puzzle. To redress this we might start by imagining a necrontology that systematically interrogates all of the material residues germane to the mortuary record, insofar as these can be taken to be emblematic of broader societal conceptualizations of the life lived, the lifelong experience of “being-towards-death” (Tonner 2018), the individual experience of dying and death, the community’s participation in the individual’s dying process, the subsequent handling of the corpse (as well as the individual’s tangible possessions and intangible social entanglements), the fate of the social person after death and of the body after disposal, and the ongoing relations of the living with the material and memory traces of the deceased. In this way, a necrontology might embrace all of the insights into individual lives (and population-level patterns of living) that bioarchaeology might provide in addition to the more focused cultural problematization of death toward which mortuary archaeology aspires. Necrontology implies a sustained interest in past constructions of dying and death (and all that these might entail) and the post-life existence of both the substance and the idea of the deceased.
Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas, 2018
Although it seems impossible, and not necessarily helpful, to completely disregard the positivist... more Although it seems impossible, and not necessarily helpful, to completely disregard the positivist frameworks that have long been the primary organizers of archaeological knowledge production, it has become increasingly apparent that reality can be productively framed in innumerable alternative ways 1. In other words, we might somewhat disregard the processualists, or at least take their reality to be one ontological frame among many. This isn't to suggest that scientific archaeology is equal to any other approach to the past, since it is vastly better materialized than most-in universities, professional associations like the one that kindly organized the meeting at which this paper was presented, academic publishers, museums, governments, CRM firms, popular media-and circulates in the minds and practices of archaeologists, their associates, and their followers. Rather, it is merely to suggest that it isn't correct in its self-regard as the sole arbiter of knowledge of the past, the arbiter archaeologiae. Other accounts of reality are not only possible but inevitable. Indeed, without years-eventually decades-of ongoing struggle to master the disciplinary codes that operate in archaeology, we wouldn't quite share in them, and should consider ourselves fallen, abandoned to one of the multitudinous, vulgar, civilian ontologies. But what of a relational ontology? Isn't it an unavoidable paradox that a democratic theorization of ontological multiplicity is founded on a singular theoretical dictate? Doesn't the ontologist merely snatch the crown of arbiter archaeologiae from the scientist, leaving the sovereign institutional edifice largely intact? Perhaps. Although "ontology as a question seems to poke holes in the very idea that common denominators exist" (Alberti et al. 2011:901), this is its common denominator, the foundational premise it brings to each purported instance of ontological difference. It would seem to exclude, or at least scold, alterities that reject alterity, that is, that dismiss the
Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement ... more Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement of northeastern Canada to the present day. Tasked with pulling sleds and assisting people with other subsistence activities in the winter, dogs required regular provisioning with protein and fat. In this paper, we conduct stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analysis of the skeletal remains of dogs (n = 35) and wild fauna (n = 68) from sites located on the north and south coasts of Labrador to characterize dog provisioning between the 15th to early 19th centuries. In addition, we analyse bone (n = 20) and dentine (n = 4) collagen from dogs from Double Mer Point, a communal house site in Hamilton Inlet to investigate how dog diets intersected with Inuit subsistence and trade activities at a local level. We find that dog diets were largely composed of marine mammal protein, but that dogs on the north coast consumed more caribou and fish relative to dogs from the central and south coast sites. The diets of dogs from Double Mer Point were the most heterogenous of any site, suggesting long-distance movement of people and/or animals along the coast.
Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement ... more Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement of northeastern Canada to the present day. Tasked with pulling sleds and assisting people with other subsistence activities in the winter, dogs required regular provisioning with protein and fat. In this paper, we conduct stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analysis of the skeletal remains of dogs (n = 35) and wild fauna (n = 68) from sites located on the north and south coasts of Labrador to characterize dog provisioning between the 15th to early 19th centuries. In addition, we analyse bone (n = 20) and dentine (n = 4) collagen from dogs from Double Mer Point, a communal house site in Hamilton Inlet to investigate how dog diets intersected with Inuit subsistence and trade activities at a local level. We find that dog diets were largely composed of marine mammal protein, but that dogs on the north coast consumed more caribou and fish relative to dogs from the central and south coast sites. The diets of dogs from Double Mer Point were the most heterogenous of any site, suggesting long-distance movement of people and/or animals along the coast.
Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement ... more Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement of northeastern Canada to the present day. Tasked with pulling sleds and assisting people with other subsistence activities in the winter, dogs required regular provisioning with protein and fat. In this paper, we conduct stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analysis of the skeletal remains of dogs (n = 35) and wild fauna (n = 68) from sites located on the north and south coasts of Labrador to characterize dog provisioning between the 15th to early 19th centuries. In addition, we analyse bone (n = 20) and dentine (n = 4) collagen from dogs from Double Mer Point, a communal house site in Hamilton Inlet to investigate how dog diets intersected with Inuit subsistence and trade activities at a local level. We find that dog diets were largely composed of marine mammal protein, but that dogs on the north coast consumed more caribou and fish relative to dogs from the central and south coast sites. The diets of dogs from Double Mer Point were the most heterogenous of any site, suggesting long-distance movement of people and/or animals along the coast.
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.
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 ...
Thule archaeological sites typically yield large quantities of well-preserved faunal remains. The... more Thule archaeological sites typically yield large quantities of well-preserved faunal remains. These remains represent a wealth of information on a wide range of activities related to Thule animal-based subsistence economies, but have only recently been subjected to the quantitative ecological analyses that have increasingly concerned archaeologists elsewhere. This thesis involves the development of a linear programming model of Thule resource scheduling, and an explicit test of its applicability. When compared to the results of a detailed zooarchaeological analysis of faunal material collected from a variety of seasonal site types on southeastern Somerset Island, the modelling procedure was found to offer moderately interesting insights not otherwise attainable.
ABSTRACT Formulae for estimating the age and sex of caribou are derived from measurements taken f... more ABSTRACT 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.
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.
The use of cannabis, narcotics, and other intoxicants is widespread within
North American prisons... more The use of cannabis, narcotics, and other intoxicants is widespread within North American prisons, where do-it-yourself instruments are fashioned, used, traded, discarded, and/or confiscated. This cycle contributes to the long-term record of material culture and provides an opportunity to study innovations employed by incarcerated persons. An assemblage of improvised devices for consuming illicit drugs (pipes, syringe, and decoys) from Her Majesty’s Penitentiary (HMP) in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, provides an opportunity to explore the culture of twentieth-century drug consumption at an exceptionally long-lived penal institution. The collection of drug paraphernalia dates between 1971 and 1983 and represents a palimpsest of curated items confiscated by correctional officers. By drawing upon actor-network theory and a folkloric approach to the material assemblage, we situate this local assemblage within the larger carceral context wherein individuals “make do.” These objects speak to longstanding and widely shared technological traditions, an accomplished do-it-yourself ethic amongst those incarcerated, and the complex entanglement of criminality, carceral practices, and drug use.
Exploring Ontologies of the Precontact Americas, 2024
Perhaps more than any other discrete material practice, the manner in which a society disposes of... more Perhaps more than any other discrete material practice, the manner in which a society disposes of its dead reveals its ontological drift. Although arguably of null importance for the individual concerned, mortuary rites provide an opportunity for the living to articulate, often in an exceptionally public and communal forum, their understandings of life, death, and the afterlife, reiterating the social identity of the deceased and his or her survivors and often installing some more or less durable memorial to carry this conversation forward. Reused cemeteries, crypts, and mounds come to represent vast corporeal archives of these long-running discourses on the local meaning of a human life. Although these settings have long interested mortuary archaeologists and bioarchaeologists, they should exert a particular pull on archaeologists interested in past local conceptualizations of being—ontologies— precisely because it seems that these conceptualizations cannot fail to be expressed in the treatment of the dead (although deciphering them will undoubtedly be challenging). What seems to be demanded is a dedicated attempt to unravel local understandings and experiences of dying, death, mortuary ritual, and the afterlife. But whereas bioarchaeology has been predominantly concerned with the recovery of information on the life of individuals (diet, mobility, work, injury, disease, cause of death, etc.), and mortuary archaeology with the practices associated with the handling of bodies at end of life, neither fully addresses wider conceptualizations of the person across a fully imagined life course that begins at conception and carries on past corporeal death, though each holds critical pieces of the puzzle. To redress this we might start by imagining a necrontology that systematically interrogates all of the material residues germane to the mortuary record, insofar as these can be taken to be emblematic of broader societal conceptualizations of the life lived, the lifelong experience of “being-towards-death” (Tonner 2018), the individual experience of dying and death, the community’s participation in the individual’s dying process, the subsequent handling of the corpse (as well as the individual’s tangible possessions and intangible social entanglements), the fate of the social person after death and of the body after disposal, and the ongoing relations of the living with the material and memory traces of the deceased. In this way, a necrontology might embrace all of the insights into individual lives (and population-level patterns of living) that bioarchaeology might provide in addition to the more focused cultural problematization of death toward which mortuary archaeology aspires. Necrontology implies a sustained interest in past constructions of dying and death (and all that these might entail) and the post-life existence of both the substance and the idea of the deceased.
Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas, 2018
Although it seems impossible, and not necessarily helpful, to completely disregard the positivist... more Although it seems impossible, and not necessarily helpful, to completely disregard the positivist frameworks that have long been the primary organizers of archaeological knowledge production, it has become increasingly apparent that reality can be productively framed in innumerable alternative ways 1. In other words, we might somewhat disregard the processualists, or at least take their reality to be one ontological frame among many. This isn't to suggest that scientific archaeology is equal to any other approach to the past, since it is vastly better materialized than most-in universities, professional associations like the one that kindly organized the meeting at which this paper was presented, academic publishers, museums, governments, CRM firms, popular media-and circulates in the minds and practices of archaeologists, their associates, and their followers. Rather, it is merely to suggest that it isn't correct in its self-regard as the sole arbiter of knowledge of the past, the arbiter archaeologiae. Other accounts of reality are not only possible but inevitable. Indeed, without years-eventually decades-of ongoing struggle to master the disciplinary codes that operate in archaeology, we wouldn't quite share in them, and should consider ourselves fallen, abandoned to one of the multitudinous, vulgar, civilian ontologies. But what of a relational ontology? Isn't it an unavoidable paradox that a democratic theorization of ontological multiplicity is founded on a singular theoretical dictate? Doesn't the ontologist merely snatch the crown of arbiter archaeologiae from the scientist, leaving the sovereign institutional edifice largely intact? Perhaps. Although "ontology as a question seems to poke holes in the very idea that common denominators exist" (Alberti et al. 2011:901), this is its common denominator, the foundational premise it brings to each purported instance of ontological difference. It would seem to exclude, or at least scold, alterities that reject alterity, that is, that dismiss the
Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement ... more Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement of northeastern Canada to the present day. Tasked with pulling sleds and assisting people with other subsistence activities in the winter, dogs required regular provisioning with protein and fat. In this paper, we conduct stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analysis of the skeletal remains of dogs (n = 35) and wild fauna (n = 68) from sites located on the north and south coasts of Labrador to characterize dog provisioning between the 15th to early 19th centuries. In addition, we analyse bone (n = 20) and dentine (n = 4) collagen from dogs from Double Mer Point, a communal house site in Hamilton Inlet to investigate how dog diets intersected with Inuit subsistence and trade activities at a local level. We find that dog diets were largely composed of marine mammal protein, but that dogs on the north coast consumed more caribou and fish relative to dogs from the central and south coast sites. The diets of dogs from Double Mer Point were the most heterogenous of any site, suggesting long-distance movement of people and/or animals along the coast.
Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement ... more Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement of northeastern Canada to the present day. Tasked with pulling sleds and assisting people with other subsistence activities in the winter, dogs required regular provisioning with protein and fat. In this paper, we conduct stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analysis of the skeletal remains of dogs (n = 35) and wild fauna (n = 68) from sites located on the north and south coasts of Labrador to characterize dog provisioning between the 15th to early 19th centuries. In addition, we analyse bone (n = 20) and dentine (n = 4) collagen from dogs from Double Mer Point, a communal house site in Hamilton Inlet to investigate how dog diets intersected with Inuit subsistence and trade activities at a local level. We find that dog diets were largely composed of marine mammal protein, but that dogs on the north coast consumed more caribou and fish relative to dogs from the central and south coast sites. The diets of dogs from Double Mer Point were the most heterogenous of any site, suggesting long-distance movement of people and/or animals along the coast.
Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement ... more Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement of northeastern Canada to the present day. Tasked with pulling sleds and assisting people with other subsistence activities in the winter, dogs required regular provisioning with protein and fat. In this paper, we conduct stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analysis of the skeletal remains of dogs (n = 35) and wild fauna (n = 68) from sites located on the north and south coasts of Labrador to characterize dog provisioning between the 15th to early 19th centuries. In addition, we analyse bone (n = 20) and dentine (n = 4) collagen from dogs from Double Mer Point, a communal house site in Hamilton Inlet to investigate how dog diets intersected with Inuit subsistence and trade activities at a local level. We find that dog diets were largely composed of marine mammal protein, but that dogs on the north coast consumed more caribou and fish relative to dogs from the central and south coast sites. The diets of dogs from Double Mer Point were the most heterogenous of any site, suggesting long-distance movement of people and/or animals along the coast.
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.
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 ...
Thule archaeological sites typically yield large quantities of well-preserved faunal remains. The... more Thule archaeological sites typically yield large quantities of well-preserved faunal remains. These remains represent a wealth of information on a wide range of activities related to Thule animal-based subsistence economies, but have only recently been subjected to the quantitative ecological analyses that have increasingly concerned archaeologists elsewhere. This thesis involves the development of a linear programming model of Thule resource scheduling, and an explicit test of its applicability. When compared to the results of a detailed zooarchaeological analysis of faunal material collected from a variety of seasonal site types on southeastern Somerset Island, the modelling procedure was found to offer moderately interesting insights not otherwise attainable.
ABSTRACT Formulae for estimating the age and sex of caribou are derived from measurements taken f... more ABSTRACT 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.
Conventional treatment of the dead varied substantially across the Inuit world. Bodies might be d... more Conventional treatment of the dead varied substantially across the Inuit world. Bodies might be deposited in carefully constructed cairns next to settlements or more simply exposed on the land or sea ice. It also varied locally depending on understandings of the afterlife, how individuals were conceptualized in death, the circumstances of death, and the deceased’s relationships to the living, as appears to have been the case in precontact Labrador and Greenland. Although a boulder pile overlying a simple crypt is the most widespread form of mortuary treatment, distinctly house-like cairn morphologies occur, some are associated with detached caches of mortuary offerings, and their placement on the landscape varied substantially. Many are clustered in cemeteries close to settlements, but some are idiosyncratically situated on elevated outcrops or next to isolated ponds. If the manner of disposal of the dead speaks to an ontology of death and the afterlife – a "necrontology" - as archaeologists conventionally assume, then the Inuit version was clearly complex.
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Papers by Peter Whitridge
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.
North American prisons, where do-it-yourself instruments are fashioned, used, traded, discarded, and/or confiscated. This cycle contributes to the long-term record of material culture and provides an opportunity to
study innovations employed by incarcerated persons. An assemblage of improvised devices for consuming illicit drugs (pipes, syringe, and decoys) from Her Majesty’s Penitentiary (HMP) in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, provides an opportunity to explore the culture of twentieth-century drug consumption at an exceptionally long-lived penal institution.
The collection of drug paraphernalia dates between 1971 and 1983 and represents a palimpsest of curated items confiscated by correctional officers. By drawing upon actor-network theory and a folkloric approach to
the material assemblage, we situate this local assemblage within the larger carceral context wherein individuals “make do.” These objects
speak to longstanding and widely shared technological traditions, an accomplished do-it-yourself ethic amongst those incarcerated,
and the complex entanglement of criminality, carceral practices, and drug use.
for the living to articulate, often in an exceptionally public and communal
forum, their understandings of life, death, and the afterlife, reiterating
the social identity of the deceased and his or her survivors and often installing some more or less durable memorial to carry this conversation forward. Reused cemeteries, crypts, and mounds come to represent vast corporeal archives of these long-running discourses on the local meaning of a human life. Although these settings have long interested mortuary archaeologists and bioarchaeologists, they should exert a particular pull on archaeologists interested in past local conceptualizations of being—ontologies— precisely because it seems that these conceptualizations cannot fail to be expressed in the treatment of the dead (although deciphering them will undoubtedly be challenging). What seems to be demanded is a dedicated attempt to unravel local understandings and experiences of dying, death, mortuary ritual, and the afterlife. But whereas bioarchaeology has been predominantly concerned with the recovery of information on the life of individuals (diet, mobility, work, injury, disease, cause of death, etc.), and mortuary archaeology with the practices associated with the handling of bodies at end of life, neither fully
addresses wider conceptualizations of the person across a fully imagined life course that begins at conception and carries on past corporeal death, though each holds critical pieces of the puzzle. To redress this we might start by imagining a necrontology that systematically interrogates all of the material residues germane to the mortuary record, insofar as these can be taken to be emblematic of broader societal conceptualizations
of the life lived, the lifelong experience of “being-towards-death”
(Tonner 2018), the individual experience of dying and death, the community’s participation in the individual’s dying process, the subsequent handling of the corpse (as well as the individual’s tangible possessions and intangible social entanglements), the fate of the social person after death and of the body after disposal, and the ongoing relations of the living with the material and memory traces of the deceased. In this way, a necrontology might embrace all of the insights into individual lives (and population-level patterns of living)
that bioarchaeology might provide in addition to the more focused cultural
problematization of death toward which mortuary archaeology aspires.
Necrontology implies a sustained interest in past constructions of dying and death (and all that these might entail) and the post-life
existence of both the substance and the idea of the deceased.
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.
North American prisons, where do-it-yourself instruments are fashioned, used, traded, discarded, and/or confiscated. This cycle contributes to the long-term record of material culture and provides an opportunity to
study innovations employed by incarcerated persons. An assemblage of improvised devices for consuming illicit drugs (pipes, syringe, and decoys) from Her Majesty’s Penitentiary (HMP) in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, provides an opportunity to explore the culture of twentieth-century drug consumption at an exceptionally long-lived penal institution.
The collection of drug paraphernalia dates between 1971 and 1983 and represents a palimpsest of curated items confiscated by correctional officers. By drawing upon actor-network theory and a folkloric approach to
the material assemblage, we situate this local assemblage within the larger carceral context wherein individuals “make do.” These objects
speak to longstanding and widely shared technological traditions, an accomplished do-it-yourself ethic amongst those incarcerated,
and the complex entanglement of criminality, carceral practices, and drug use.
for the living to articulate, often in an exceptionally public and communal
forum, their understandings of life, death, and the afterlife, reiterating
the social identity of the deceased and his or her survivors and often installing some more or less durable memorial to carry this conversation forward. Reused cemeteries, crypts, and mounds come to represent vast corporeal archives of these long-running discourses on the local meaning of a human life. Although these settings have long interested mortuary archaeologists and bioarchaeologists, they should exert a particular pull on archaeologists interested in past local conceptualizations of being—ontologies— precisely because it seems that these conceptualizations cannot fail to be expressed in the treatment of the dead (although deciphering them will undoubtedly be challenging). What seems to be demanded is a dedicated attempt to unravel local understandings and experiences of dying, death, mortuary ritual, and the afterlife. But whereas bioarchaeology has been predominantly concerned with the recovery of information on the life of individuals (diet, mobility, work, injury, disease, cause of death, etc.), and mortuary archaeology with the practices associated with the handling of bodies at end of life, neither fully
addresses wider conceptualizations of the person across a fully imagined life course that begins at conception and carries on past corporeal death, though each holds critical pieces of the puzzle. To redress this we might start by imagining a necrontology that systematically interrogates all of the material residues germane to the mortuary record, insofar as these can be taken to be emblematic of broader societal conceptualizations
of the life lived, the lifelong experience of “being-towards-death”
(Tonner 2018), the individual experience of dying and death, the community’s participation in the individual’s dying process, the subsequent handling of the corpse (as well as the individual’s tangible possessions and intangible social entanglements), the fate of the social person after death and of the body after disposal, and the ongoing relations of the living with the material and memory traces of the deceased. In this way, a necrontology might embrace all of the insights into individual lives (and population-level patterns of living)
that bioarchaeology might provide in addition to the more focused cultural
problematization of death toward which mortuary archaeology aspires.
Necrontology implies a sustained interest in past constructions of dying and death (and all that these might entail) and the post-life
existence of both the substance and the idea of the deceased.