page_title: Yup'ik doll
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Yup'ik doll / History
caption_attribution_description: Eskimo human effigy form, Honolulu Museum of Art
context_page_description: Yup'ik doll is a traditional Eskimo style doll and figurine form made in the southwestern Alaska by Yup'ik people. Also known as Cup'ik doll for the Chevak Cup'ik dialect speaking Eskimos of Chevak and Cup'ig doll for the Nunivak Cup'ig dialect speaking Eskimos of Nunivak Island. Typically, Yup'ik dolls are dressed in traditional Eskimo style Yup'ik clothing, intended to protect the wearer from cold weather, and are often made from traditional materials obtained through food gathering. Play dolls from the Yup'ik area were made of wood, bone, or walrus ivory and measured from one to twelve inches in height or more. Male and female dolls were often distinguished anatomically and can be told apart by the addition of ivory labrets for males and chin tattooing for females. The information about play dolls within Alaska Native cultures is sporadic. As is so often the case in early museum collections, it is difficult to distinguish dolls made for play from those made for ritual. There were always five dolls making up a family: a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, and a baby. Some human figurines were used by shamans.
context_section_description: For more than a thousand years, Alaska Native people have fashioned human figurines out of stone, bone, walrus ivory, rodent claws, trade cloth during the North American fur trade, and many other materials. Children played with such figurines (usually called dolls) but their other uses in both everyday and ceremonial life are less well known.
  The collection of dolls and human miniatures from Alaska Native cultures at the University of Alaska Museum of the North includes several thousand figures from Alaska's prehistoric and early historic periods and is one of the largest and most representative public collections of historic and modern Alaska Native dolls in existence. All six ethnocultural groups in Alaska, the Iñupiaq and Yup'ik Eskimos, the Aleuts (Unangan) and Alutiiqs (Sugpiaq), and the Athabaskan and Northwest Coast Indians (as Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian) are represented in the collection, although the Central Yup'ik and St. Lawrence Island Siberian Yupik collections of human figures are largest.
  Bering Strait region by far the largest number and oldest examples of human figurines from prehistoric Alaska (the Okvik period of Old Bering Sea cultures) have been excavated on and near St. Lawrence Island. Punuk sites from the nearby Punuk Islands yield figurines whose body style is similar to those of the Old Bering Sea cultures. Thule human figurines, unlike the preceding styles from the coast of Siberia and St. Lawrence Island, are found across the North American Arctic from the Bering Strait to Greenland.
  The Nunalleq (lit. "old village") is an archaeological site of a Yup’ik winter village (or qasgiq) near the Quinhagak in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region of Southwestern Alaska which has the easily the largest collection of pre-contact Yup'ik material anywhere. The site was occupied circa 500-700 years ago, and is currently the scene of the largest archaeological excavation to have taken place in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region of Alaska. The waterlogged and frozen tundra has led to the excellent preservation of organic materials and the recovery of rarely recovered artefacts such as anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines.
caption: Eskimo human figurine, Honolulu Museum of Art.
exif: {}