Hello,
Are you (or any of your colleagues or students) working with an interesting assemblage of bear remains from North America? If so, please consider contributing a paper to a session that we are organizing for the 2017 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meetings in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
The title and abstract are below. Our goal is to bring together researchers to talk about and re-examine the varied uses, beliefs about, and roles of bears across cultures and time periods using both new and old data, to get people talking about bears and sharing their perspectives on human–bear relationships.
The deadline for SAA abstracts is rapidly approaching in about three weeks on Thursday, September 8, so we need to move quickly if you are interested. Please contact Heather Lapham ([log in to unmask]) and Greg Waselkov ([log in to unmask]) off-list. We look forward to hearing from you.
Title: An Other-Than-Human Being: The Archaeology of Bears in North America
Abstract: Ever since Irving Hallowell's classic 1926 ethnographic study of the special mythic status of bears in the Subarctic, anthropologists are generally aware that many peoples throughout the world have treated bears as far more than a subsistence resource, something more akin to another kind of human or an other-than-human being. Hallowell attributed that special relationship between Subarctic humans and bears to some striking parallels between bear and human behaviors and physiologies. If that were indeed the case, then one would expect to see similar relationships outside the Subarctic, although in fact Hallowell found little evidence for the special treatment of bears elsewhere in North America. Archaeological and historical research over the last nine decades, however, has produced a vast amount of as yet unsynthesized information on the roles of bears in Native American beliefs, rituals, and subsistence. Taking into account ecological variables of bear demography, reproductive rate, habitat use, seasonal availability, and trophic level, we invite participants in this session to draw on new and existing data to reconsider zooarchaeological and other evidence of bear hunting and use in light of the range of relationships that existed between bears and humans across the millennia in Native North America.
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Dr. Heather Lapham
Research Laboratories of Archaeology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Email: [log in to unmask]
Dr. Gregory Waselkov
Anthropology
University of South Alabama
Email: [log in to unmask]
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