This is the story of two groups of Eskimo. The text will introduce you to the Nunamiut Eskimo of Alaska. The quicktime movies will take you to a different area of the Arctic world and show you some of the last film of traditional life. The video is taken from a Nature program that focuses on the Arctic environment. These short clips help show how Eskimos have adapted to the harsh Arctic world.
The Nunamiut Eskimo
The Nunamiut Eskimo live on the northern slopes, foothills, and adjacent plain of the Brooks Mountains in northern Alaska. They dwell in a harsh environment, with long, severe winters and sub-zero temperatures for months on end. There are about 72 days of total winter darkness from about November 15. In summer, the plains thaw and become a marshland swarming with blackflies and mosquitoes. The main caribou migrations occur in March and April, and again in September and October. In spring, the caribou move north through Anaktuvuk Pass to feed on the plains, retreating south again in the fall. The annual round of Nunamiut life revolves around the annual caribou migrations.
Archaeologist Lewis Binford decided to study the Nunamiut Eskimo to learn as much as he could about their hunting strategies, butchering techniques, and use of their prey as food and for other purposes. Then, taking the caribou bones they abandoned at their hunting camps and dwelling sites, he tried to relate their behavior to the information which he recovered from their broken food remains.
The Nunamiut depend more heavily on meat than any other living hunter-gatherer group. Binford estimates that each adult eats around a cup and a half of vegetable foods a year, supplemented by the partially digested stomach contents of caribou, also some dried fish and sea mammal meat traded from coastal neighbors. These same neighbors also provide them with much vital fat needed for winter cooking and heating. In an arctic environment that has a growing season of only twenty-two days, the Nunamiut rely on stored food entirely for eight and a half months a year, and partially on it for an additional month and a half. Fresh meat is freely available for only two months a year, mainly during the caribou migrations.
Every March, the scattered Nunamiut groups gather for the spring caribou hunt, a time when they also trap grizzly bears, and smaller animals. They live in temporary settlements, where they build corrals about 148 by 295 feet across. The hunters drive the caribou into the corrals, where they are snared or shoot. The hunt continues for days on end for several weeks, with as many as 200 to 300 animals being taken on a good day. The women skin the caribou, cutting the meat in springs, drying some of it, pounding the rest up with fat and berries. They crack open the leg bones for marrow, boil and eat the fetuses, also the stomach contents. Much of the meat, and sometimes hunting artifacts, are stored at the camp site. Everyone disperses into groups of two or three households during the summer months, congregating again in the fall, when the people hunted migrating caribou again, this time mainly calves, for their skins.
The Nunamiut adaptation depended on two aggressive hunting periods in spring and fall, and on the storage strategies that were keyed to them. That they were able to hunt caribou twice a year was a factor of the topography in their homeland, which lies close to the borders of both summer and winter caribou feeding grounds. The movements of the people were oriented toward seasonal game movements and to storage and other needs, a form of "optimal foraging strategy," a phrase commonly used by ecologists. Such optimizing of resources was habitual among late Age hunters, too .