When faced with the presence of hostile others on the landscape, hunter-gatherers may choose or be obliged to retreat to areas beyond the reach of their enemies-to run to the hills. Although sometimes successful, "running to the hills" often incurs additional risks and/or requires fundamental transformations of land-use patterns, subsistence strategies, and dimensions of social life. This article explores this strategy as it unfolded among the Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland. Forced to seek refuge in the island's interior in the wake of European encroachment on the coast, the formerly maritime-adapted Beothuk were compelled to adopt a new-terrestrially focused-adaptation in a short period of time. Their failure to succeed at this venture underscores the value that coastal resources had in the Beothuk's "traditional" subsistence economy. But perhaps more importantly, their demise illustrates the critical role that social relations play in informing hunter-gatherer adaptations.
Archaeologists are interested in understanding the conditions under which hunter‐gatherer intensification occurs. Typically, most models assign primacy to population pressure or social relations and address intensification as it occurs among foragers inhabiting arid or temperate environments. In this article, I explore episodes of resource intensification and “deintensification” on the subarctic island of Newfoundland. Correlating periods of resource intensification and “deintensification” with changes in the social landscape, I argue that the presence or absence of “Others” played a significant role in informing hunter‐gatherer subsistence strategies and settlement patterns.
The Indigenous Beothuk of Newfoundland disappeared as a cultural entity in the early nineteenth century. Prior to this, the Beothuk had few direct interactions with Europeans, and those that occurred were generally of a hostile nature. As a result, very little is known about Beothuk religious life. Drawing on available ethnohistoric records, an analysis of burial site locations and funerary objects, we offer an interpretation of Beothuk sacred cosmology that places birds at the centre of their belief system.
There's a popular meme that my archaeology friends have been circulating on social media lately: a picture of Giorgio Tsoukalos, a producer of the popular History Channel show Ancient Aliens, overlaid with the caption “I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.” The caption is a play on Tsoukalos's and others’ claims that the archaeological and historical record contains ample evidence for alien visits to earth in antiquity. To wit, past episodes of the show have suggested that Kachinas, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and indigenous rock art depict aliens; that much of the monumental art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica, South America, Near East, Easter Island (of course), Malta, and elsewhere represents the genius of extraterrestrial visitors; that Mayan kings were not really people but alien overlords; that extraterrestrials were responsible for the demise of many civilizations—if not the dinosaurs, too—and so on.
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