Profs & Pints Northern Virginia: Deer to Us

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Deer to Us,” on more than 12,000 years of interactions between eastern North America’s white-tailed deer and human residents, with Elic Weitzel, postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and adjunct professor of anthropology at George Mason University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nv-deer .]

Given their abundance in our backyards and along highway corridors, few people today would suspect that white-tailed deer were on the verge of extinction at the turn of the 20th century mainly as a result of commercial hunting.

Learn about the complicated, centuries-old relationship between deer and people in our region with Elic Weitzel, who has spent the last decade studying the historical ecology of white-tailed deer and other species.

He’ll tell the story of our white-tail deer from prehistoric abundance to steady decline from the colonial era deerskin trade to resurgence under the modern conservation movement.

Combining evidence from archaeological excavations, historical sources, and contemporary conservation biology, Dr. Weitzel will describe how Native Americans hunted and managed deer for millennia and discuss the reasons why this pre-colonial hunting may have been relatively sustainable.

He’ll talk about how deer populations began to decline after the arrival of Europeans on our continent, and he’ll discuss the role that the deerskin trade and market economics played. Finally, he’ll look at how conservation efforts in the 20th century led to the recovery of deer and to the (sometimes problematic) abundance we see today.

You’ll learn lessons from the past that can help us better understand and promote sustainability in the present and future. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A white-tailed deer. (Photo by Roy Smith / Wikimedia Commons.)