Dig It is KTW’s frequently released column on the history underneath our feet in the Kamloops area, composed by a group of archaeologists.
Many years back, early in my (Matt Begg’s) profession as an expert archaeologist, I was relaxing a campfire with a number of coworkers, among whom was an accomplished faunal expert (somebody who examines bones, or pieces of bones, discovered at historical sites).
I asked my associate about dogs, particularly, what did the typical town dog in the Southern Interior of British Columbia appear like?
He pointed at my medium-sized, mixed-breed brown/black/tan/white dog and said, “Probably a lot like him.”
Many people have actually become aware of a few of the specialized dog types in pre-contact B.C., such as the Salish hair dog, however we don’t hear much about the average, ordinary town dog that was living along with, or with, the pre-contact residents of our area.
I’ve constantly had rather mixed-breed dogs — the good-to-a-free home or sprung-out-of-the-pound range. They’ve constantly been medium-sized and someplace in between one breed or another.
Is this what the town dog appeared like? Were they anything like the Sadies, Fidos and Bellas we understand and enjoy today?
Domestic dogs have actually been recognized in historical sites around the globe. Research taking a look at dog stays excavated from pithouse town websites along the middle Fraser River, near Lillooet, suggests their existence along with individuals throughout the last 2,000 years a minimum of, though we can presume for much, a lot longer.
At the Keatley Creek website, for instance, the remains of a minimum of 15 domestic dogs were revealed throughout scholastic examinations (Crellin and Heffner 2000:162).
In a recent publication, the function of dogs in mid-Fraser town websites are assumed under 4 classifications: hunting help, sources of labour, indications of wealth or complimentary roaming.
The historical proof is compared to ethnographic descriptions and some broad conclusions can be made.
Free-wandering town dogs were most likely common in pre-contact towns, working as refuse cleaners (consider any food you drop on the flooring or disposal of waste items), cautions of close-by threats (I have a dog that alerts me about approaching snowplows) and, likely, as buddies.
Ethnographies in the center Fraser explain dogs as types of wealth, offering dog conceal clothes, dog skin quivers and sources of meat. The usage of dogs as labourers is not well recorded in the historical record, however a minimum of one set of dog stays discovered at the Keatley Creek town website recommends it might have served to load products, such as transporting fish up from the river (Prentiss et al. 2021, Crellin and Heffner 2000).
Although there is still some unpredictability surrounding what those free-roaming town dogs would have appeared like, the excavated remains of Canis familiaris in middle Fraser town websites reveal a difference in between domesticated town dogs and wild dogs (wolves and coyotes).
Notably, town dogs are referred to as being smaller sized than wolves, however more robust than coyotes, with much shorter muzzles than their wild family members.
We can’t understand for sure what these dogs appeared like, however we think their genes continue to be given through modern-day dogs.
Whenever I’m at a dog park, I overhear discussions about dog types — the specific modern-day types that suit narrow classifications or ideas about the different types that entered into producing the dogs to which I am drawn.
Whenever I see my dog tidy up after a campfire or caution me about close-by wild animals (or snowplows), I question if she may be, a minimum of partly, a descendent of the town dogs of the past.
Alysha Edwards is a St’at’imc archaeologist presently at graduate school at the University of Montana and Matt Begg is a Kamloops-based archaeologist. Interested in more? Go online to republicofarchaeology.ca.
Dig It is KTW’s frequently released column on the history underneath our feet in the Kamloops area, composed by a group of archaeologists. Past columns are at kamloopsthisweek.com.
