“This is the way”: Knowledge networks and toolkit specialization in the circumpolar coastal landscapes of western Alaska and Tierra del Fuego

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.

Keywords:

• Holocene climate change
• coastal hunter-gatherer adaptations
• polar landscapes
• subsistence strategies
• anthropological archaeology

Acknowledgements

We thank the community of Quinhagak, Qanirtuuq Inc., and the University of Aberdeen’s Quinhagak Archaeological Project for their support and hospitality over the years; some of the insights presented in this article were generated through the interactions of J.S.L. with the local community and the archaeological team led by Dr Rick Knecht and Dr Charlotta Hillerdal over several summer fieldwork seasons (2015, 2017–2019). We are very grateful to Professor Rick Schulting and Professor Peter Mitchell (University of Oxford), for providing useful comments and suggestions to improve the manuscript, and to James Clark (University of Cambridge), for discussing with us many aspects of hunter-gatherer ecology across time and space, from landscape knowledge networks and the seasonal scheduling of resource procurement strategies to the intricacies of the relationship between technological investment and resource processing returns. We also thank Rachel Smith (University of Oxford) for sharing insights on the cosmological dimensions of human–animal interactions and the geomorphological dynamics of coastal landscapes.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The research of G.L.M. is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/R012709/1] through a Baillie Gifford AHRC Scholarship (OOC-DTP program) for his DPhil in Archaeology at St. Hugh’s College, University of Oxford (UK). J.S.L.’s fieldwork and travel costs to Quinhagak, Alaska in 2019 were funded by the Keble Association. The research of J.S.L. is funded by the Emslie Horniman Scholarship Fund (Royal Anthropological Institute/Sutasoma Trust) and a Heritage Seed Fund grant (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities).