Ottawa expert learns bear facts
Ancient Dorset carvings show spiritual connection to animals
An Ottawa archaeologist and a world-renowned wildlife biologist have combined their expertise to answer an age-old question: Why did the Dorset produce so many miniature polar bear carvings?
Matthew Betts, a curator with the Canadian Museum of History, had been intrigued by the bear carvings ever since he began to study archeology in the 1990s.
Why, he wondered, were polar bears such a popular subject for carvers, and what did that say about the Dorset people who lived in the Arctic for thousands of years before mysteriously vanishing about 700 years ago.
Polar bear figurines, carved from ivory, antler, wood and soapstone, have been found in the permafrost at Dorset sites across the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. In Dorset art, polar bears appear more frequently than any other animal, and almost as often as people.
Betts began to study the Canadian Museum of History’s Dorset art collection in 2007 and later teamed with Alberta-based wildlife biologist Ian Stirling to better understand the movements being depicted in the carvings.
“I recognized that I needed a high-level, detailed understanding of polar bear behaviour,” said Betts, who had worked in the High Arctic for many years, but had never encountered a polar bear.
Betts compiled a list of 131 Dorset polar bear carvings — taken from 42 sites in Canada and Greenland — and sent Stirling detailed descriptions and pictures of all of them.
Stirling, an emeritus scientist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, is an internationally recognized polar bear expert who has worked in the Arctic for more than four decades.
He determined that most of the carved polar bears were depicted in natural poses, and that almost all of them involved hunting stances: bears waiting patiently for a seal to surface, or stalking their prey on the ice.
Previous studies of the same carvings had suggested that the polar bears were in “fantastical” poses. Scholars had theorized that the carvings showed bears moving — sometimes flying — between human and spirit worlds.
In their recently published research, however, Stirling, Betts and Greenland’s Mari Hardenberg concluded the Dorset mostly carved polar bears in hunting poses. “We were able to dispel this myth that they were symbolic and show they’re more representational: that they’re actually showing bears doing real things,” Betts said in an interview.
According to the researchers, the miniature carvings were used by Dorset hunters to express their spiritual connection to polar bears — and as teaching tools.
“The effigies may reveal the Dorset observations of polar bears were critical for learning efficient hunting practices … and the effigies themselves could have been used as learning aids,” concludes their research study, published by the Society for American Archaeology.
Polar bears and Dorset men hunted in proximity along the edge of the Arctic sea ice in the late winter and spring. They were both after the seals which surfaced for air and sometimes hauled themselves onto the ice.
Polar bears are known to make spectacular leaps to capture a seal, but most of the time, they employ more stealthy methods: lying or sitting next to an air hole or ice lead, waiting for a seal to come within striking distance.
About 40 per cent of Dorset carvings studied by the researchers depicted polar bears engaged in this kind of “still-hunting.”
Dorset hunters armed with spears often used the same method, Betts said. “They both hunted seals in the same season, in the same locations, almost all the time,” he said.
“They must have been very closely related.”
The Dorset suddenly died out about 700 years ago, leaving behind no genetic descendants. It’s theorized that they came under pressure from climate change — a warming phase in the Arctic — and from the appearance of the more technologically advanced Thule, ancestors of today’s Inuit, who hunted with kayaks and bows.
Many of the polar bear carvings that remain in existence date from the late period of Dorset history. Betts said that fact likely reflects a desperate attempt by the Dorset to reassert their place in the universe “while it literally melted out from under them.”
A large part of the Dorset art collection held by the Canadian Museum of History will go on display in July 2017, when the new Canadian History Hall is unveiled.