Message #248880

[Trina Demario]

Bears are also known from Neolithic petroglyphs in Siberia and numerous finds of bear heads or headless bear figurines in the Arctic region. But none of these have been found in a ritual context like the two from Igloolik.
Bear figurines could explain lack of finds of burial sites

Since the ritual with fireplaces appears to stretch across time and space, the researchers believe the finds are of far greater importance than previously thought.
Facts

The Danish National Museum's comprehensive research initiative 'Northern Worlds' aims to generate new insights into the relationship between man and the environment over the past 15,000 years, with a perspective on the present, where substantial climatic change is taking place.

It will also shed light on global networks by studying Northern cultures from the Ice Age hunters to the present-day populations in the cold regions.

‘Northern Worlds’ consists of more than 20 projects, headed by leading researchers from all departments at the Danish National Museum.

The bear figurines on the fireplaces are not only some of the few physical vestiges testifying to the Dorset culture’s view of life and death that archaeologist have ever come across.

The figurines may also help explain an old mystery – why archaeologists only rarely find burial sites from the earliest settlers in Greenland and Arctic Canada.
Dorset people may have dismembered their dead

Although there’s no shortage of ancient Inuit tales about the special relationship between humans and animals, the oral sources tend to dry out once we start moving toward the millennia before the Inuit settled in Arctic Canada and Greenland.

“We have so far had glaringly few archaeological finds from pre-Inuit graves on other ritual elements that could increase our understanding of how the pre-Inuit people viewed their world,” says Appelt.

“This is where the bear figurines suddenly make many pieces fall into place. Suddenly we understand the many other figures with bear heads or headless bears in a completely different way.”

That the two bear figurines from the fireplaces have their skeletons carved on the outside of their bodies also confirms a suspicion the archaeologists have had that Dorset people probably dismembered their dead and scattered them out on the fields or sunk them in the sea, so they would end up as animal food – like we’re seeing in e.g. today’s Nepal and Tibet.

“This suspicion is compounded by the fact that the few bones we’ve actually found from the Dorset culture are not whole skeletons, but simple elements – a jaw, a thighbone, etc.

This suggests that the Dorset people had a completely different view of skeletons and bodies from what we have today – which the carvings of external skeletons on the bear figurines testify to.”