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Hunting-Pit Systems in the Northern Interior

Archaeological Perspectives on Hunter-Gatherer Landscapes and Resource Management in Interior North Norway - Marianne Skandfer

Description

I begin with a brief descriptive introduction to hunting pits as archaeological features, before turning to a consideration of the ethnohistorical sources on ungulate hunting in northern Fennoscandia. I then provide an overview of previous research on hunting facilities, concentrating on hunting pits and with an emphasis on northern Norway, which leads into a consideration of the methodological challenges raised by this research. This is followed by a discussion of the dating of hunting pits. I then turn to the archaeological data of interior Troms and Finnmark counties, which are handled by telescoping between different geographical scales. At the broadest scale, I begin with an overview of the distribution of hunting pits in these two counties but also including data from neighboring areas of Finland and Sweden – these are relevant because prior to the imposition of modern state boundaries both ungulates and humans traversed across much of this region. I then zoom in to consider selected portions of the two Norwegian counties, with the goal of discussing the organization of hunting-pit systems on the regional level. In particular, I examine how hunting-pit systems are arranged in a regional landscape and how these regional arrangements fit with modern reindeer migration routes and seasonal pastures. The zoom in then continues further, with a look at selected examples of individual hunting-pit systems, ranging from smallscale (<10 pits) to large-scale (300 pits) systems, and exploring how they make use of their immediate landscapes and what they might imply about the local organization of ungulate hunting. The discussion then turns to hunting strategies and organization, variation in hunting intensity relative to climate changes, and issues of resource management.

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