Totem poles are often seen as quintessential items of the Northwest Coast of America. The Simon Frazer University lists ten types of totem pole which displays their diversity and use. Three common types from the list are memorial poles, welcome/potlatch figures, and house posts. Memorial poles are raised after the death of a chief or important person; the motives and symbols it bears memorialize significant events in their life. Welcome/potlatch figures are raised and put in sight of guests arriving from afar or by water for banquets or meetings. These anthropomorphic poles are usually depicted in welcoming postures. Related to welcome/potlatch figures are speakers posts which model ancestral figures with open mouths; people stand behind these poles and speak as part of greeting ceremony. Both these forms can be accompanied by a larger pole known as a commemorative figure, decorated with symbolic designs and family crests, stood outside meeting houses.
Hamatsa secret society 1895 (Hayden & Villeneuve, 2011)
A house post is symbolically human and architectural. Depending on the type of house, these posts come in singles or doubles and support roof beams. In addition to their form as fearsome supernatural beings, they combine carvings signifying lineage and histories. The Hamatsa society relate a legend about an encounter with house posts which bears on the origin of the totem pole. Two brothers got lost on a hunting trip and found a strange house with red smoke oozing from its roof. When they entered nobody was there but one of the house posts was a living woman. She warned them about the owner of the house, a dreadful giant with man-eating birds for his companions. When the giant returned the brothers defeated him and from his house they took bird and bear masks and the first totem pole back to their world.
Northwest Coast poles are world renowned for their towering sizes and fine artistry. Whether or not the term ‘totem’ is misapplied to them, they are essentially columns representing ancestral beings ornamented with culturally significant extras. As they are usually made of perishable materials such as wood, determining the age of pole traditions, or where they originated, is difficult but that are not exclusively specific to America.
In 1894 a large wooden statue was discovered at a depth of 4-metres in a peatbog on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains, about 100 km from present-day Ekaterinburg, Russia. Today, these mountains mark the boundary between western Russia and Siberia. The broadly anthropomorphic sculpture became known as the ‘Shigir Idol’ named after the wetland in which it was found, a site known for other prehistoric finds such as a bear mask, bear fang amulets, and an antler staff-head depicting a beast of bear-boar-wolf appearance. The wetland owner presented the Shigir Idol as a gift to the Urals Society of Natural History, today the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum.
The creaky old idol was made from a larch tree split in half and would have originally stood at a height of about 5-metres. Lower fragments of it have become lost. The statue is impressively old; in the 1990s it was radiocarbon dated to an age of about 9,500 years which, at that time, was thought incorrect due to assumptions about hunter-gatherer abilities. In 2018, a Russo-German team re-dated the sculpture to 11,600 years, back to the Early Holocene, making the statue a circumstantial weathervane of climate change.
The meaning of its complex symbolic feature has attracted different ideas including creation myths of the indigenous Ural peoples, or a navigational tool. Indigenous memory expert, Lynne Kelly, thinks totem poles stored knowledge without identified writing systems, which appears applicable here. Its series of vertical faces may represent gods and ancestors or different events concerning one. Possibly, it might have depicted a forest spirit, marker of a sacred borderland, or a more blatant “keep out” sign.
Göbekli Tepe “totem pole” (image, AC)
While other examples like the Shigir Idol have not been found, it was likely not a one off. Its deep age led the research team to compare it with the anthropomorphic pillars of Gӧbekli Tepe, which surprisingly are synchronous in date. In fact, a much smaller “totem pole” with schemes similar to Northwest Coast designs, topped with a bear head and made of stone rather than wood was also found at GT.
Other research traces a continuity of shamanic images between Siberia and Anatolia. Confronting the lack of written sources among early sub-Arctic groups, archaeologists Harald Haarman and Joan Marler look at Ice Age material culture from the Mal’ta settlement west of Lake Baikal. In their analysis, this portable art which includes bear and waterfowl figurines and symbolic jewelry is a refrigerator of mythic prototypes around which shamanic belief systems crystalized. Dating from 23,000 BCE onwards, the Mal’ta iconography for them retains basic motifs which, despite stylistic variations and changes in material, trace an enormous longevity of ideas across interconnected zones of prehistoric culture between Siberia and Anatolia.
While there is no evidence of monumental forms on scale of the Shigir Idol, they note the spirit poles of Altaic communities which mark sacred spaces and entrances to communities. Indeed, these poles eventually moved westward to both sides of the Bering Strait. Indigenous North American mythology is regarded as ‘moderately Siberian’ and perhaps this extends to totem pole traditions given their deep origins.
Yuri Berezkin (2005) “Continental Eurasian and Pacific Links in American Mythologies and Their Possible Time-depth.” Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 21(2): 99-115
Lynne Kelly The Memory Code. London: Atlantic Books 2017
Harald Haarman & Joan Marler Introducing the Mythological Crescent: Ancient Beliefs and Imagery connecting Eurasia with Anatolia. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag 2008