Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these hypotheses, we generated mitochondrial DNA and geometric morphometric data of skull and dental elements from a total of 922 North American Arctic dogs and wolves spanning over 4500 years. Our analyses revealed that dogs from Inuit sites dating from 2000 BP possess morphological and genetic signatures that distinguish them from earlier Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and identified a novel mitochondrial clade in eastern Siberia and Alaska. The genetic legacy of these Inuit dogs survives today in modern Arctic sledge dogs despite phenotypic differences between archaeological and modern Arctic dogs. Together, our data reveal that Inuit dogs derive from a secondary pre-contact migration of dogs distinct from Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and probably aided the Inuit expansion across the North American Arctic beginning around 1000 BP.

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Walrus-tusk ivory and walrus-hide rope were highly desired goods in Viking Age northwest Europe. New finds of walrus bone and ivory in early Viking Age contexts in Iceland are concentrated in the southwest , and suggest extensive exploitation of nearby walrus for meat, hide and ivory during the first century of settlement. In Greenland, archaeofauna suggest a very different specialized long-distance hunting of the much larger walrus populations in the Disko Bay area that brought mainly ivory to the settlement areas and eventually to European markets. New lead isotopic analysis of archaeological walrus ivory and bone from Greenland and Iceland offers a tool for identifying possible source regions of walrus ivory during the early Middle Ages. This opens possibilities for assessing the development and relative importance of hunting grounds from the point of view of exported products.

37Archaeological records provide a unique source of direct data on long-term human-38 environment interactions and samples of ecosystems affected by differing degrees of human 39 impact. Distributed long-term datasets from archaeological sites provide a significant contribution 40 to establish local, regional, and continental-scale environmental baselines and can be used to 41 understand the implications of human decision-making and its impacts on the environment and the 42 resources it provides for human use. Deeper temporal environmental baselines are essential for 43 resource and environmental managers to restore biodiversity and build resilience in depleted 44 ecosystems. Human actions are likely to have impacts that reorganize ecosystem structures by 45 reducing diversity through processes such as niche construction. This makes data from 46 archaeological sites key assets for the management of contemporary and future climate change 47 scenarios because they combine information about human behavior, environmental baselines, and 48 biological systems. Sites of this kind collectively form Distributed Long-term Observing Networks 49 of the Past (DONOP), allowing human behavior and environmental impacts to be assessed over 50 space and time. Behavioral perspectives are gained from direct evidence of human actions in 51 response to environmental opportunities and change. Baseline perspectives are gained from data 52 on species, landforms, and ecology over timescales that long predate our typically recent datasets 53 that only record systems already disturbed by people. And biological perspectives can provide 54 essential data for modern managers wanting to understand and utilize past diversity (i.e., trophic 55 and/or genetic) as a way of revealing, and potentially correcting, weaknesses in our contemporary 56 wild and domestic animal populations. 57 58

The offshore islands of the North Atlantic were among some of the last settled places on earth, with humans reaching the Faroes and Iceland in the late Iron Age and Viking period. While older accounts emphasizing deforestation and soil erosion have presented this story of island colonization as yet another social–ecological disaster, recent archaeological and paleoenvironmental research combined with environmental history, environmental humanities, and bioscience is providing a more complex understanding of long-term human ecodynamics in these northern islands. An ongoing interdisciplinary investigation of the management of domestic pigs and wild bird populations in Faroes and Iceland is presented as an example of sustained resource management using local and traditional knowledge to create structures for successful wild fowl management on the millennial scale.