You might say this is a shaggy dog story, but I believe
it's much more than that!
Eight years ago, Tessa Campbell heard a genuine shaggy dog story. Wayne Williams, an elder of the Tulalip Indian Tribe, was donating material to the Hibulb Cultural Center on the tribal reservation in Washington State.
He told Ms. Campbell, the museum’s senior curator, that his donation included a dog wool blanket.
Weavers examining it were unconvinced, suspecting it was mountain goat wool.
But examination under an electron microscope at the University of Victoria in British Columbia in 2019 confirmed what Mr. Williams, who died in 2017, had said: The blanket, dated to about 1850, contained dog wool, lending credence to stories from the oral tradition of the Coast Salish Indigenous peoples of a special dog that was long kept and bred for its fleece.
A study published last month in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology adds to the evidence for the industry that produced this dog wool, as well as its ancient roots.
The analysis by Iain McKechnie, a zooarchaeologist with the Hakai Institute, and two co-authors examined data collected over 55 years from over 16,000 specimens of the dog family across the Pacific Northwest. It suggests the vast majority of canid bones from 210 Pacific Coast archaeological sites, from Oregon to Alaska, were not from wild wolves, coyotes or foxes. Instead, they were domestic dogs, including small woolly ones that were kept for their fur.
The way I see it anyway!
Tessa Campbell
