Aron Crowell

Smithsonian Institution · Department of Anthropology

Sustainable Indigenous resource use reflects balance between animal populations and levels of human consumption, influenced by natural cycles of faunal abundance, community size and subsistence needs, procurement technologies, and the requirements of trade or commodity production. Sustainability is “epiphenomenal” when animal populations are preser...

p dir="ltr">Fiord glaciers of southern Alaska reshape landscapes as they advance and retreat in response to climate cycles, influencing coastal ecosystems by enriching marine food webs with minerals carried in meltwater and ice floes. On land, biodiverse forest ecosystems grow and mature as glaciers withdraw, connected to the sea by glacially fed r...

For millennia, Inuit peoples of the Arctic and Subarctic have been challenged by the impacts of climate change on the abundance of key subsistence species. Responses to climate-induced declines in animal populations included switching to alternative food sources and/or migrating to regions of greater availability. We examine these dynamics for the...

This paper considers a specific kind of hunting strategy, ambush hunting, employed by Ju/’hoansi San who reside in northwestern Botswana and northeastern Namibia. We examine this hunting technique from ethnoarchaeological, archaeological, historical, and ethnographic perspectives. Data are drawn from an analysis of 14 blinds at ǂGi Pan on the Botsw...

We measured δ¹⁸O values in modern and archaeological Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) otoliths recovered from Aialik Bay on the Pacific coast of the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, using a high precision ion microprobe. Values of δ¹⁸O were measured in as many as sixty 10-μm spots along 2–3 mm transects from the otolith core to its margin with high spot-t...

Starting in about 1870, indigenous residents of southeast Alaska intensified their traditional hunting of harbor seals (Phoca vitulina richardii) in order to produce surpluses of skins and oil for trade with the Alaska Commercial Company. The most important hunting ground was the head of Yakutat Bay, where thousands of seals were taken annually in...

As a linguistic medium, oral tradition conveys rich and specific detail about past events but is also subject to alteration in the course of transmission between generations. As a source for indigenous history, spoken heritage is characteristically specific in geographic attribution and thus definitive of cultural landscapes, but it is temporally u...

Capitalism did not extend around the globe by an invisible hand; it was imposed in face-to-face encounters that drew European colonizers and indigenous populations into processes of confrontation, accommodation, and exchange. Russian conquest and rule of Alaska (1743–1867) was accompanied by class-mediated cultural fusion and the emergence of a new...

A conifer forest on the shore of Verdant Cove, an inlet of Aialik Bay on the southeast coast of the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, was buried by high-energy beach sediments shortly after 860 ± 50 I4C years BP. The switch from ocean-distal forest to cobble beach indicates a radical change in depositional environment suggestive of rapid subsidence of 1–3.5...

The incidence of plate-boundary earthquakes across 3 prospective tectonic segments at the Alaska subduction zone (ASZ) in the late Holocene is reconstructed from geological evidence of abrupt land-level change and archaeological evidence of discontinuities in occupation of native villages. Bracketing radiocarbon ages on uplifted and down-dropped co...

A collaborative study of the Smithsonian Institution's ethnology collections has inspired the narration of Alaska Native oral traditions, including Yupik Elder Estelle Oozevaseuk's re-telling (in 2001) of the story of Kukulek village and the St. Lawrence Island famine and epidemic of 1878–80. The loss of at least 1,000 lives and all but two of the...

Terms of engagement: The collaborative representation of Alutiiq identity The book and exhibition Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the Alutiiq People present both Alutiiq and anthropological perspectives on a complex Alaska Native ethnicity. This community-based project, produced by the Smithsonian Institution and Alutiiq Museum in Kodia...

Though not as dramatic as during the last Ice Age, pronounced climatic changes occurred in the northeastern Pacific over the last 10,000 years. Summers warmer and drier than today's accompanied a Hypsithermal interval between 9 and 6 ka. Subsequent Neoglaciation was marked by glacier expansion after 5-6 ka and the assembly of modern-type plant comm...

The Russian colonial building style originated in the wooden architecture of western Russia, which included large, sturdy, and artistically elaborated peasant houses (izby) and farm buildings with notched log corners. The houses had planked roofs and were ornamented with delicately carved wooden facades, gable panels, balconies, and window frames (...

Excavations at Three Saints Harbor in 1990 and 1991 yielded 1059 historic period artifacts and 4036 individual faunal specimens. The initial description and interpretation of these materials is organized by industry (e.g., glass, ceramics, iron) in order to emphasize the production, distribution, and modification of materials within the world syste...

The goal of this study has been to use historical archaeology to explore social, economic, and cultural processes on the Russian periphery of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century capitalist world system. It has been an opportunity to create and explore a set of interactions between excavation results, particularistic historical data, and ideas ab...

Historical archaeology is the “archaeology of capitalism” (Paynter 1988), including its evolution and expansion, economic and social impacts, and the material culture of the industrial age. As an integrated world system of capitalist economies coalesced during the late eighteenth century, Russian fur merchants pushed eastward from Siberia to Alaska...

When Grigorii Shelikhov landed with two shiploads of men on the outer coast of Kodiak Island in August 1784, his mission was audacious and thoroughly commercial–to explore and conquer the coastal regions of southern Alaska, establish a permanent and self-sustaining Russian colony, systematize the exploitation of Alaska Native labor, harvest large q...

Archaeological studies at the Three Saints Harbor Krepost site (KOD-083) were undertaken to complement and balance the historical record reviewed in the preceding chapter. Russian adaptation and maintenance on the American frontier, conquest and social accommodation with respect to its indigenous peoples, and the gradual formation of a stratified,...

An assessment of subsistence hunting and natural resource management among Ju/'hoansi Bushmen (San) over a period of 30 years from the 1960s to 1995 was carried out as part of anthropological investigations of remote foraging and food-producing populations in the northwestern Kalahari Desert region of Botswana and Namibia. The Ju/'hoansi pursue a d...

We use data on the age, size, structure, and environmental context of 1295 Gulf of Alaska archaeological sites to examine variation in the spatial and temporal distribution of coastal sites of Prince William Sound, the outer Kenai Peninsula, the Kodiak Archipelago, and the southeast Alaska Peninsula. The general effects of environmental variation a...

Late 19th century dance masks, beaded headdresses, and other ceremonial arcticles from Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula provide evidence for the extended postcontact continuity of Koniag religious beliefs and shamanic practices. Objects were selected for study from the large and well-documented William J. Fisher collection at the National Mus...