Study: Dogs were once bred in Northwest for woolly fur
Eight years ago, Tessa Campbell heard a genuine shaggy dog story.
In 2012, Wayne W. Williams, an elder of the Tulalip Tribes, was donating material to the Hibulb Cultural Center on the tribal reservation in Washington state. He told Campbell, the museum’s senior curator, that his donation included a dog wool blanket.
Weavers examining it were unconvinced, suspecting it was mountain goat wool. But examination under an electron microscope at the University of Victoria in British Columbia in 2019 confirmed what Williams, who died in 2017, had said: The blanket, dated to about 1850, contained dog wool, lending credence to stories from the Coast Salish Indigenous peoples of a special dog that was bred for its fleece.
A study published last month in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology adds to the evidence for the industry that produced this dog wool, as well as its ancient roots. The analysis by Iain McKechnie, a zoo archaeologist with the Hakai Institute, and two co-authors examined data collected over 55 years from over 16,000 specimens of the dog family across the Pacific Northwest. It suggests most canid bones from 210
Pacific Coast archaeological sites, from Oregon to Alaska, were not from wild wolves, coyotes or foxes. Instead, they were domestic dogs, including small woolly ones that were kept for their fur.
While the Indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest are often associated with their traditional harvesting of salmon, whales and clams, their animal husbandry on land is less well known. The study highlights their underappreciated breeding of animals — particularly dogs — for wool.
One of McKechnie’s co-authors, Susan Crockford, has studied dog bones in archaeology sites for many years. Starting in the 1990s, she noticed that Pacific Northwest domestic dog remains were of two distinct size catego
ries — large and small.
Distinguishing domestic hounds from their wild cousins can be difficult, and most specimens from previous archaeological studies lacked species identification, said Madonna Moss, another co-author from the University of Oregon.
The team discovered that British Columbia was a precontact hot spot for domestic dogs. On the south coast of British Columbia, smaller dogs that would have had woolly fur outnumbered larger hunting dogs, and “seemed to be a long-term, persistent part of Indigenous community life for the last 5,000 years,” McKechnie said.
These knee-high wool dogs weren’t combed like modern pooches but sheared like sheep.