1. Gerstle River Site<\/span><\/h5>\n <\/p>\n
Modern anthropological theory has long been built on a belief that there is a boundary between the human body and the outside world. Inside the body it is the mind, or consciousness, which perceives the exterior universe. However, the question always remains: where is the edge of the body and where is the boundary located?<\/span><\/p>\nIn the summer of 2010, I was working as a Teaching Assistant of the Archaeological Field School, University of Alaska Fairbanks on the Gerstle River site in the Alaskan Interior. My anthropological knowledge told me that the foraging culture is the most ancient lifestyle, predating the emergence of agriculture and animal domestication in human history on many lands of the world. Interior Alaskan foragers represent an exceptional case. They sustained such a survival style for 10,000 years until 300 years ago when White people arrived. During my study of Alaskan archaeology, more questions emerged in my mind: did hunting groups hunt animals and gather plants only for their substance, or were there other meaningful purposes? Were they only materialists, or were they spiritualists as well?<\/span><\/p>\nThe site was the home of a small-sized community. We do not know the exact number of the people. It might have been composed of 10-20 or possibly 20-40 members. We also do not know how many years this group had inhabited the site. It could have been anywhere between 100 and 1,000 years. What we do know is that the site was their seasonal settlement in summer, where they cooked, ate, made tools, and slept, and perhaps where they also danced, sang, and conducted rituals. The remains we found include animal bone pieces, which might be discarded after eating, unfinished lithic tools, and broken lithic weaponry.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Mountain\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/coreopsis.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Figure-2-Copy-1024x685.jpg?resize=640%2C428&ssl=1\")
<\/span><\/p>\nThe site sits on a slope directly facing the famous Alaskan Mountains. White snow covers the tops of the mountains during all seasons. When Alaska summer sun sets at midnight, the clouds and the snow always shine with different colors: dark red, pink, or orange-red. Every evening after dinner, I liked to sit on the site to admire the splendor of the scenery. My whole body and mind were often immersed in the natural views, and I found that my consciousness was completely fused with the wildness and my body actually became one with the universe. There was no boundary; there was no division. Perhaps my sensual experience was similar to that of hunters who lived many thousands of years ago in this beautiful region, close to nature. In hunting societies, there is evidence that the body embraced nature and was embraced by nature. Foragers hunted not only to obtain food to eat, but to absorb the universe’s energy. A hunting society never separated from nature because it was part of nature. The ancient hunters were not materialists, or pure spiritualists; they were actually cosmologists.<\/span><\/p>\nAt a moment on the Girstle River site, when my mind was infused with the wilderness again, I felt privy to Christopher McCandless\u2019 hidden secret. In the spring of 1992, Christopher McCandless, a young man from Georgia, now famous for Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) and a movie with the same title, walked into the Alaska wilderness and lived in the forest alone for four months before his death by food poisoning. It is hard for many people to understand why he left his family and modern life to challenge himself with deadly hardship. However, I seemed to read his mind at this moment. He came to Alaska not to practice his survival skills, but rather, to pursue his spiritual purpose. As Krakauer wrote, \u201cMcCandless went into wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large, but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul……An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one’s attention outward as much as inward\u201d (1996: 183).<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Site\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/coreopsis.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Figure-1-Copy-1024x685.jpg?resize=640%2C428&ssl=1\")
<\/span><\/p>\nMy personal experience on the Gerstle River site inspired me to think that, in a prehistoric hunting-gathering society, human mind and natural environment were possibly an integral whole. They were actually inseparable. However, for centuries, anthropologists have always clearly divided culture from nature, mind from material, and inside from outside. It is likely that they have an ontological misunderstanding of ancient cosmology.<\/span><\/p>\n2. New Animism<\/span><\/h5>\n <\/p>\n
The dichotomy of nature\/culture and body\/mind in modern philosophy was initiated by the work of Rene Descartes. Within the Cartesian scheme of things, the world is divided into two opposite domains: the external (nature or body) and the internal (culture or mind) (Synnott 1993). Archaeology has long been articulated in this dualism. However, since the 1990s, more and more archaeologists are inclined to eliminate the demarcation between the oppositions of internal and external, or inside and outside, because these binary relations are believed to mislead archaeologists when they deal with excavated materials. The British archaeologist Julain Thomas is one of these critical archaeologists. In his point of view, it is a mistake for us to clearly distinguish culture from nature, because the body and the world are interwoven and inseparable. Cultural practices demonstrate that ancient people did not simply move things from the natural world into the cultural world, but instead, \u201cit is a means of entering into the network of relationships which obtains between bodies and materials, and into the creation of meaning\u201d (Thomas 1996: 19).<\/span><\/p>\nDoubtlessly, the idea \u201cnetwork of relationships\u201d means that the world is a network interwoven by various relations rather than being composed of binary structures. These relations, in Tim Ingold’s opinion, are like threads which weave various materials together. Whether a tree in the air, a cloud in the sky, or a stone in the river, they all join in the process of formation, thus all are \u201ca certain gathering together of the threads of life\u201d (2010: 4). In this way, materials, like humans, inhabit the world rather than occupy the world. They are active, no more stable, and flow to form a process like the life of a person. Therefore, the dualism is actually a modern assumption to misguide us to mis-understand the material world. In Ingold’s words,<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cThere is no inside or outside, and no boundary separating the two domains. Rather there is a trail of movement or growth. Every such trail traces a relation. But the relation is not between one thing and another \u2013 between the organism \u201chere\u201d and the environment \u201cthere.\u201d It is rather a trail along which life is lived: one strand in a tissue of trails that together make up the texture of the lifeworld\u201d (2006: 13).<\/span><\/p>\nThis anti-dualism trend is also represented by \u201cnew animism\u201d scholars. New animism anthropologists focus on indigenous myth, cosmology, and shamanic practices, and have proposed an animism ontology theory. According to animism ontology, animals as non-human persons are equal to humans: they have souls, specific cultures, and social systems, and they also perceive themselves as anthropomorphic beings. Both humans and non-humans are endowed with the same generic type of soul and the same set of cognitive capacities (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004).<\/span><\/p>\nThis new animist ontology is different from animism in the western evolutionary model, which proposes that indigenous peoples see all things in the world as animated and \u201cmarks the origin of religion\u201d (Wallis 2009: 51). Evolutionary animism sees the whole world as one nature. Humans are seen as animals when they are \u201cprimitive\u201d and \u201cuncultured\u201d (Harvey 2006: 99). Such perspective is apparently built on the dualist idea, however, new animism views all things as a single culture (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). That is to say, there is no boundary between culture and nature. All things, including humans and non-humans, have subjectivity and there are no objects in the world. In evolutionary theory, humans, animals, and non-life objects are animated. In contrast, new animism argues that all these humans and non-humans have the same condition \u2013 humanity rather than animality.<\/span><\/p>\nDrawing from Amerindian cosmology, animist ontology reveals that while humans see themselves as humans, animals and spirits also see themselves as humans. Animals and spirits have their own houses and villages, they perceive themselves as anthropomorphic beings, they have their specific cultures, and they also organize their own social systems like humans (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 470). These animals and spirits are hence called \u201cnon-human persons\u201d (Pedersen 2001, 2007; Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004) or \u201cother-than human persons\u201d (Harvey 2006; Wallis 2009, 2013). All beings inhabiting the world, including human beings and non-human beings, possess the human condition, and they are thus all subjective. In this way, it is not hard to understand why the human body becomes one with nature.<\/span><\/p>\nAnimist scholars thus view the body as the central concept in explaining the differences between humans and non-humans. Although humans and non-humans embody the same soul, they are differentiated by different body shapes. In Viveiros de Castro’s words, \u201cBetween the formal subjectivity of souls and the substantial materiality of organisms there is an intermediate plane which is occupied by the body as a bundle of affects and capacities and which is the origin of perspectives\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n(Viveiros de Castro1998: 478).<\/span><\/p>\nSuch body conception and new animist perspective enable archaeologists to consider archaeological artifacts as dynamic, transformative things inhabiting the world rather than as animated objects. Combining ethnological analyses, for example, Vanpool and Newsome (2012) provide an ontological approach on prehistoric pottery of the Casas Grandes region of the American Southwest and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Drawing away from Cartesian dualism, Vanpool and Newsome see pottery as non-human beings, which served as active agents in a cosmological and ontological structure. The pot was thus a non-human person, which was transformed from formless clay and experienced a life history of birth, existence and death.<\/span><\/p>\n3. Prehistoric Eskimo Ivories<\/span><\/h5>\n <\/p>\n
After the Gerstle River excavation in the summer of 2010, I came back to my Ph.D. study at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The focus of my Ph.D. research is ivory artifacts that were produced by prehistoric Eskimos of the Bering Strait region. The data were collected from the University of Alaska Museum in 2012. The early periods of prehistoric Eskimo culture on the West Alaska coast and Russian Chukchi coast were represented by Okvik culture (AD 100 \u2013 400) and Old Bering Sea culture (OBS, AD 400 \u2013 800).<\/span><\/p>\n
In the summer of 2010, I was working as a Teaching Assistant of the Archaeological Field School, University of Alaska Fairbanks on the Gerstle River site in the Alaskan Interior. My anthropological knowledge told me that the foraging culture is the most ancient lifestyle, predating the emergence of agriculture and animal domestication in human history on many lands of the world. Interior Alaskan foragers represent an exceptional case. They sustained such a survival style for 10,000 years until 300 years ago when White people arrived. During my study of Alaskan archaeology, more questions emerged in my mind: did hunting groups hunt animals and gather plants only for their substance, or were there other meaningful purposes? Were they only materialists, or were they spiritualists as well?<\/span><\/p>\n The site was the home of a small-sized community. We do not know the exact number of the people. It might have been composed of 10-20 or possibly 20-40 members. We also do not know how many years this group had inhabited the site. It could have been anywhere between 100 and 1,000 years. What we do know is that the site was their seasonal settlement in summer, where they cooked, ate, made tools, and slept, and perhaps where they also danced, sang, and conducted rituals. The remains we found include animal bone pieces, which might be discarded after eating, unfinished lithic tools, and broken lithic weaponry.<\/span><\/p>\n The site sits on a slope directly facing the famous Alaskan Mountains. White snow covers the tops of the mountains during all seasons. When Alaska summer sun sets at midnight, the clouds and the snow always shine with different colors: dark red, pink, or orange-red. Every evening after dinner, I liked to sit on the site to admire the splendor of the scenery. My whole body and mind were often immersed in the natural views, and I found that my consciousness was completely fused with the wildness and my body actually became one with the universe. There was no boundary; there was no division. Perhaps my sensual experience was similar to that of hunters who lived many thousands of years ago in this beautiful region, close to nature. In hunting societies, there is evidence that the body embraced nature and was embraced by nature. Foragers hunted not only to obtain food to eat, but to absorb the universe’s energy. A hunting society never separated from nature because it was part of nature. The ancient hunters were not materialists, or pure spiritualists; they were actually cosmologists.<\/span><\/p>\n At a moment on the Girstle River site, when my mind was infused with the wilderness again, I felt privy to Christopher McCandless\u2019 hidden secret. In the spring of 1992, Christopher McCandless, a young man from Georgia, now famous for Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) and a movie with the same title, walked into the Alaska wilderness and lived in the forest alone for four months before his death by food poisoning. It is hard for many people to understand why he left his family and modern life to challenge himself with deadly hardship. However, I seemed to read his mind at this moment. He came to Alaska not to practice his survival skills, but rather, to pursue his spiritual purpose. As Krakauer wrote, \u201cMcCandless went into wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large, but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul……An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one’s attention outward as much as inward\u201d (1996: 183).<\/span><\/p>\n My personal experience on the Gerstle River site inspired me to think that, in a prehistoric hunting-gathering society, human mind and natural environment were possibly an integral whole. They were actually inseparable. However, for centuries, anthropologists have always clearly divided culture from nature, mind from material, and inside from outside. It is likely that they have an ontological misunderstanding of ancient cosmology.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The dichotomy of nature\/culture and body\/mind in modern philosophy was initiated by the work of Rene Descartes. Within the Cartesian scheme of things, the world is divided into two opposite domains: the external (nature or body) and the internal (culture or mind) (Synnott 1993). Archaeology has long been articulated in this dualism. However, since the 1990s, more and more archaeologists are inclined to eliminate the demarcation between the oppositions of internal and external, or inside and outside, because these binary relations are believed to mislead archaeologists when they deal with excavated materials. The British archaeologist Julain Thomas is one of these critical archaeologists. In his point of view, it is a mistake for us to clearly distinguish culture from nature, because the body and the world are interwoven and inseparable. Cultural practices demonstrate that ancient people did not simply move things from the natural world into the cultural world, but instead, \u201cit is a means of entering into the network of relationships which obtains between bodies and materials, and into the creation of meaning\u201d (Thomas 1996: 19).<\/span><\/p>\n Doubtlessly, the idea \u201cnetwork of relationships\u201d means that the world is a network interwoven by various relations rather than being composed of binary structures. These relations, in Tim Ingold’s opinion, are like threads which weave various materials together. Whether a tree in the air, a cloud in the sky, or a stone in the river, they all join in the process of formation, thus all are \u201ca certain gathering together of the threads of life\u201d (2010: 4). In this way, materials, like humans, inhabit the world rather than occupy the world. They are active, no more stable, and flow to form a process like the life of a person. Therefore, the dualism is actually a modern assumption to misguide us to mis-understand the material world. In Ingold’s words,<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThere is no inside or outside, and no boundary separating the two domains. Rather there is a trail of movement or growth. Every such trail traces a relation. But the relation is not between one thing and another \u2013 between the organism \u201chere\u201d and the environment \u201cthere.\u201d It is rather a trail along which life is lived: one strand in a tissue of trails that together make up the texture of the lifeworld\u201d (2006: 13).<\/span><\/p>\n This anti-dualism trend is also represented by \u201cnew animism\u201d scholars. New animism anthropologists focus on indigenous myth, cosmology, and shamanic practices, and have proposed an animism ontology theory. According to animism ontology, animals as non-human persons are equal to humans: they have souls, specific cultures, and social systems, and they also perceive themselves as anthropomorphic beings. Both humans and non-humans are endowed with the same generic type of soul and the same set of cognitive capacities (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004).<\/span><\/p>\n This new animist ontology is different from animism in the western evolutionary model, which proposes that indigenous peoples see all things in the world as animated and \u201cmarks the origin of religion\u201d (Wallis 2009: 51). Evolutionary animism sees the whole world as one nature. Humans are seen as animals when they are \u201cprimitive\u201d and \u201cuncultured\u201d (Harvey 2006: 99). Such perspective is apparently built on the dualist idea, however, new animism views all things as a single culture (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). That is to say, there is no boundary between culture and nature. All things, including humans and non-humans, have subjectivity and there are no objects in the world. In evolutionary theory, humans, animals, and non-life objects are animated. In contrast, new animism argues that all these humans and non-humans have the same condition \u2013 humanity rather than animality.<\/span><\/p>\n Drawing from Amerindian cosmology, animist ontology reveals that while humans see themselves as humans, animals and spirits also see themselves as humans. Animals and spirits have their own houses and villages, they perceive themselves as anthropomorphic beings, they have their specific cultures, and they also organize their own social systems like humans (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 470). These animals and spirits are hence called \u201cnon-human persons\u201d (Pedersen 2001, 2007; Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004) or \u201cother-than human persons\u201d (Harvey 2006; Wallis 2009, 2013). All beings inhabiting the world, including human beings and non-human beings, possess the human condition, and they are thus all subjective. In this way, it is not hard to understand why the human body becomes one with nature.<\/span><\/p>\n Animist scholars thus view the body as the central concept in explaining the differences between humans and non-humans. Although humans and non-humans embody the same soul, they are differentiated by different body shapes. In Viveiros de Castro’s words, \u201cBetween the formal subjectivity of souls and the substantial materiality of organisms there is an intermediate plane which is occupied by the body as a bundle of affects and capacities and which is the origin of perspectives\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n (Viveiros de Castro1998: 478).<\/span><\/p>\n Such body conception and new animist perspective enable archaeologists to consider archaeological artifacts as dynamic, transformative things inhabiting the world rather than as animated objects. Combining ethnological analyses, for example, Vanpool and Newsome (2012) provide an ontological approach on prehistoric pottery of the Casas Grandes region of the American Southwest and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Drawing away from Cartesian dualism, Vanpool and Newsome see pottery as non-human beings, which served as active agents in a cosmological and ontological structure. The pot was thus a non-human person, which was transformed from formless clay and experienced a life history of birth, existence and death.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n After the Gerstle River excavation in the summer of 2010, I came back to my Ph.D. study at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The focus of my Ph.D. research is ivory artifacts that were produced by prehistoric Eskimos of the Bering Strait region. The data were collected from the University of Alaska Museum in 2012. The early periods of prehistoric Eskimo culture on the West Alaska coast and Russian Chukchi coast were represented by Okvik culture (AD 100 \u2013 400) and Old Bering Sea culture (OBS, AD 400 \u2013 800).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/p>\n2. New Animism<\/span><\/h5>\n
3. Prehistoric Eskimo Ivories<\/span><\/h5>\n
![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/coreopsis.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Figure-3-3.1-Copy-685x1024.jpg?resize=640%2C957&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n![\"Blubber](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/coreopsis.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Figure-3-3.2-Copy-Copy.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\n