Home, Hearth, and Household in Siberia and Northern Canada

ABSTRACT

ARC 0631970

This research project, PI John Ziker, Boise State University, is the US portion of a larger international collaboration that was conceived under the European Science Foundation, EUROCORES Programme, BOREAS. The full ESF project is a collaboration of researchers from 6 countries, including the US, Norway, Canada, Sweden, Finland and Russia. This particular project, which represents the US NSF contribution to the BOREAS effort, focuses on the theme of home, hearth and household in the central Taimyr Region and Vitim River in Siberia, Russia, Rae-Edzo, Northwest Territory, Canada, and the National Museum of the American Indians in Washington, DC. The collaboration comprises five research activities focused on detailed ethnographic, demographic, and spatial studies in these two regions. The aim of the US project is to contextualize the vernacular of portable skin lodges in the North, analyze the use of space within contemporary and prehistoric dwellings, and the social dynamics of contemporary and historic households. This is a very interdisciplinary effort, bringing together ethnography, history, ethnoarchaeolgy, and indigenous scholarship with the potential to gain new insight into the symbolic, ecological, and social roles of skin lodge dwellings through a comparison of two regions of Siberia and Canada.