Abstract
Shortly after Russian fur hunters found the uninhabited Pribilof Islands of St. Paul and St. George in the late 1780s, they began forcing Aleut men from the Aleutian Islands and Alaska Peninsula to travel there seasonally to provide labor for the profitable commercial harvest of northern fur seals. Recent archaeological surveys of the earliest Aleut and Russian work camps that were established on the islands show them to be unusual in many respects when compared to contemporary sites in the Aleutian Islands region. These include the absence of precontact site components, their relatively narrow period of occupation, their occupancy by an exclusively or nearly exclusively male population, and their potential as multiethnic settlements to reveal differences between the lives of Russian overseers and Aleut laborers.
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Veltre, D.W., McCartney, A.P. Russian exploitation of Aleuts and fur seals: The archaeology of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century settlements in the Pribilof Islands, Alaska. Hist Arch 36, 8–17 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374356
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374356