Archaeology

Digging Up Stories | Viking Hare 'Yarn' | Catching Hares

Digging Up Stories

Bones and artefacts excavated from archaeological sites within the range of Arctic hares (Lepus arcticus) provide a wide variety of information about hares and the relationships between hares and people in the distant past.

An ivory carving of an Arctic hare was excavated from a Dorset longhouse site on Knud Peninsula, on Ellesmere Island. The tiny carving is typical of the replicas of animals that the Dorset people may have offered to animal spirits to preserve the good relations between hunters and their prey. These precise sculptures, found in archaeological sites about 1000 years old, often have markings carved on them that may represent the animal's skeleton.

Animal bones excavated from a 2500 year-old archaeological site near Cow Head, Newfoundland, show that Arctic hares were the third-most common animals used for food, after seal and caribou. The people who occupied this site are known as the Groswater Palaeoeskimo group. The older Dorset Palaeoeskimo archaeological sites in Newfoundland also contain bones of Arctic hares.

An archaeological site on Bylot Island, Nunavut, was used by the well-known Inuit hunter Idlout to illustrate a story of people who ate only 'rabbits'. Idlout told the story in 1954 of a group of 'little people', smaller than children, who used to live on Bylot Island. He described the site at Canada Point, where there was a whole camp of little tent rings with only 'rabbit' bones in them.

Viking Hare 'Yarn'

A three-metre length of cordage spun from the fur of Arctic hare was found in a Dorset Palaeo-Eskimo site on Baffin Island (in Nunavut) from about 1200 AD (some 800 years ago). It may indicate a Norse presence in this region because it is comparable to the yarns found in two textile fragments from a medieval Norse settlement in Greenland. Yarn is typical of Viking/Norse culture, unlike Inuit, who used skins rather than yarn for clothing.