Animal Bones from agvik
Undergraduate student volunteers washing animal bones from Agvik.
Archaeologists study animal bones ("faunal remains") to find out what people in the past were hunting and eating. They can also indicate what time of year a site was occupied. Over 30,000 animal bones and bone fragments were excavated from Dwelling 2 in 2014. After excavation, they were brought to the zooarchaeology lab at the University of Western Ontario where a group of undergraduate student volunteers washed and catalogued them.
For her Master’s thesis, Katie Kotar examined over 9000 of these bones. They show that people who lived in the house mostly hunted ringed seal (49% of the bones), Arctic fox (27%) and caribou (15%) but also harvested snow goose, arctic hare and small numbers of a wide range of other mammals, birds and fish. People often threw away whole portions of Arctic fox carcasses (e.g. legs, back). People may have been hunting foxes primarily for their furs rather than for food. The large number of ulut in the house might have been used for preparing white fox skins. Many families settled in Sachs Harbour during the mid-1900s for white fox trapping – it seems that people long ago were also drawn to the region for its white foxes!
For her Master’s thesis, Katie Kotar examined over 9000 of these bones. They show that people who lived in the house mostly hunted ringed seal (49% of the bones), Arctic fox (27%) and caribou (15%) but also harvested snow goose, arctic hare and small numbers of a wide range of other mammals, birds and fish. People often threw away whole portions of Arctic fox carcasses (e.g. legs, back). People may have been hunting foxes primarily for their furs rather than for food. The large number of ulut in the house might have been used for preparing white fox skins. Many families settled in Sachs Harbour during the mid-1900s for white fox trapping – it seems that people long ago were also drawn to the region for its white foxes!