ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses research on prehistoric Thule Eskimo subsistence practices of the eastern Canadian Arctic, focusing on the nature and extent of bowhead whale use through the examination of mortality data. Mortality profiles of fauna represented in prehistoric bone assemblages have received considerable attention in archaeological literature. Archaeological whale bones occur in many Thule sites in the eastern Canadian Arctic, either as structural components of semisubterranean dwellings at residential sites or as primary subsistence refuse at initial processing and caching localities. In the case of active hunting, ethnographic accounts of historic bowhead whaling by North Alaskan Eskimos — the direct descendants in northern Alaska of Thule Eskimos — document a definite bias toward younger individuals on the part of hunters. Traditional methods for constructing mammalian age profiles, such as tooth eruption-wear and dental annuli, are inappropriate for bowheads because they do not possess teeth, instead feeding through a series of baleen plates.
