Birds as Co-agents: Social and Material Entanglements of the Ancestral Unangax^ in the Rat Islands

This article examines relationships between ancestral Unangax^ 1 communities and birds in the Rat Islands of the Aleutian archipelago (ca. 3000–190 BP) through avifaunal assemblages from Kiska, Hawadax, and Amchitka Islands (NISP = 24,475). Drawing on documented Unangax^ understandings of birds as persons and on values of reciprocity and non-excess, this paper states explicit expectations for how food, raw-material, clothing, and spiritual uses of particular taxa should appear in taxonomic composition, skeletal-part representation, and bone modification. Skeletal-part comparisons are restricted to elements identified to family at every site and tested with chi-square statistics. Taxonomic composition differs substantially among sites, including between the two Amchitka assemblages, whereas skeletal-part profiles within families differ modestly. The expectations are supported unevenly: whole-carcass return of alcids at Kiska is supported but indistinguishable from logistical efficiency; worked albatross and cormorant ulnae at Hawadax document tool production, although selective wing transport is not observed; and Amchitka shows broad multi-habitat engagement but not the temporal stability a herding-adjacent relationship would require. Stating expectations in advance shows where Unangax^ relational knowledge sharpens zooarchaeological interpretation and where the record cannot yet distinguish it from simpler explanations, offering a transferable model for grounding faunal analysis in descendant-community knowledge.