Despite its extreme climate, the North American Arctic holds a complex archaeological record of global significance. In this volume, leading researchers provide comprehensive coverage of the region's cultural history, addressing issues as diverse as climate change impacts on human societies, European colonial expansion, and hunter-gatherer adaptations and social organization.

Despite declining stocks worldwide and increasing health risks, artisanal whaling remains a cultural practice tied to nature’s rhythms. The Wake of the Whale presents the art, history, and challenge of whaling in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, based on a decade of award-winning fieldwork. Sightings of pilot whales in the frigid Nordic waters have drawn residents of the Faroe Islands to their boats and beaches for nearly a thousand years. Down in the tropics, around the islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, artisanal whaling is a younger trade, shaped by the legacies of slavery and colonialism but no less important to the local population. Each culture, Russell Fielding shows, has developed a distinct approach to whaling that preserves key traditions while adapting to threats of scarcity, the requirements of regulation, and a growing awareness of the humane treatment of animals. Yet these strategies struggle to account for the risks of regularly eating meat contaminated with methylmercury and other environmental pollutants introduced from abroad. Fielding considers how these and other factors may change whaling cultures forever, perhaps even bringing an end to this way of life. A rare mix of scientific and social insight, The Wake of the Whale raises compelling questions about the place of cultural traditions in the contemporary world and the sacrifices we must make for sustainability. Publication of this book was supported, in part, by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

In what distinguished anthropologist James VanStone has described as "a superb example of salvage ethnography," The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska presents a social geography of this far corner of the continent as it was during the early historic period. Author Ernest S. Burch, Jr., who has studied the area for over thirty years, contends that the Inupiaq Eskimos of northwest Alaska were organized into several autonomous societies equivalent to nations as we think of them today, but at the hunter-gatherer level of complexity. This book is a clearly written introduction to these tiny nations; it is based primarily on information the author was given by the last generation of Inupiaq elders born while oral narrative still was the primary form of historical record for their societies. The book emphasizes the identity of the nations in the region, their locations in space and time, and the numbers, lifeways, general distribution, and seasonal movements of their members. The discussion of each district includes brief summaries of previous research done there and accounts of how each nation met its demise during the second half of the nineteenth century. The work presents a substantial body of information that has never been published in book form before, and that can never be acquired again. It will endure as a major connecting link between archeological and historical research in northwest Alaska, and thus is of critical importance to understanding long-term social change in the region.

The prehistory and early history of northern societies -- from the Palaeo-eskimo pioneers to the Viking Norse Settlers -- is unfolding through archaeological and historical research and through interdisciplinary studies including natural sciences. The more insight we have gained on Arctic and North Atlantic archae-ology the more we have realised how diverse and dynamic these societies were and how complex their stories are. This volume includes articles on New approaches to dynamic analysis of Palaeo-Eskimo artefacts; Interaction with the environ-ment; Dynamics of small scale societies; Archi-tecture and social organisation of space in Palaeo-Eskimo and Inuit contexts; Origins and spread of the Palaeo-Eskimo and Inuit cultures; Demography, death and burials; Norse culture in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, e.g. outlaws of Viking Age Iceland; Trade and burials in Viking Age Britain.

This collection of 15 chronologically arranged papers is the first-ever definitive treatment of the intellectual history of Eskimology—known today as Inuit studies—the field of anthropology preoccupied with the origins, history, and culture of the Inuit people. The authors trace the growth and change in scholarship on the Inuit (Eskimo) people from the 1850s to the 1980s via profiles of scientists who made major contributions to the field and via intellectual transitions (themes) that furthered such developments. It presents an engaging story of advancement in social research, including anthropology, archaeology, human geography, and linguistics, in the polar regions. Essays written by American, Canadian, Danish, French, and Russian contributors provide for particular trajectories of research and academic tradition in the Arctic for over 130 years. Most of the essays originated as papers presented at the 18th Inuit Studies Conference hosted by the Smithsonian Institution in October 2012. Yet the book is an organized and integrated narrative; its binding theme is the diffusion of knowledge across disciplinary and national boundaries. A critical element to the story is the changing status of the Inuit people within each of the Arctic nations and the developments in national ideologies of governance, identity, and treatment of indigenous populations. This multifaceted work will resonate with a broad audience of social scientists, students of science history, humanities, and minority studies, and readers of all stripes interested in the Arctic and its peoples.

This landmark volume will stand for decades as one of the most comprehensive studies of a hunter-gatherer population ever written. In this third and final volume in a series on the early contact period Iñupiaq Eskimos of northwestern Alaska, Burch examines every topic of significance to hunter-gatherer research, ranging from discussions of social relationships and settlement structure to nineteenth-century material culture.