Europe: Northern Europe (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Benjamin. Peter Moe Astrup. Claus Skriver. Chelsea Wiseman. Geoff Bailey.

This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Shell middens, or shell-matrix deposits, occur in large numbers across the coastlines of the world from the mid- Holocene onwards, often forming substantial mounds, but they become smaller, rarer or absent as one goes back into earlier periods, suggesting a world-wide process of economic intensification....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzie Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community-Based Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper I present the work of SuALT: the Finnish Archaeological Finds Recording Linked Open Database (Fi: Suomen arkeologisten löytöjen linkitetty avoin tietokanta). SuALT is still in development, but aims to make it easy and reliable for members of the public to record chance archaeological finds that they discover and to browse other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Binkley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through collaboration with modern populations practicing traditional hunting and foraging approaches in Norwegian coastal landscapes of archaeological significance, I present an ethnoarchaeological analogy for Arctic and subarctic Late Mesolithic coastal exploitation. As part of this analogy, I introduce the Accessibility Zones Model, which delineates the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Tillison.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This PhD research project investigates rural settlements within early medieval Irish woodcraft (AD 400–1100) to ask the questions: what is craft and what makes a craftsperson during this period? Over the past few decades numerous wooden items have been recovered from this period in Ireland, thus providing an opportunity to gain insight into the crafts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guus Kroonen. Rune Iversen.

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Scandinavian hunter-, fisher- and gatherer-based Pitted Ware culture is chronologically situated in the Neolithic. However, it challenges our traditional view on cultural and social evolution by representing a return to an otherwise abandoned hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rick Schulting. Lucy Koster. Andrea Czermak. Gunita Zarina. Ilga Zagorska.

This is an abstract from the "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nature of the relationship between the living and the dead as seen through funerary rites is central to many aspects of archaeological interpretation. Indeed, this was the focus of early processual/postprocessual debates, with the former seeing a “real,” if distorted, connection...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Greer Jarrett.

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project aims to reconstruct the mental geographies and sailing routes used by Viking Age communities along the Atlantic façade by combining experimental archaeology and critical cartography. This session will present some of the results of recent fieldwork conducted in Norway and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Bolender. Eric Johnson.

Archaeologists generally assume that the absence of market exchange implies an absence of financial debt as a mechanism of exchange and social control found in more "advanced" economies. This implicit logic is reproduced in contexts where identifying market exchange largely relies on tracking the circulation of specialized and imported goods, as is the case in medieval Iceland: a society largely made up of subsistence tenant farmers where archaeological indicators of market exchange virtually...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Hambrecht. Nicole Misarti. Arni Daniel Juliosson. Francis Feeley.

This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will discuss a new NSF-funded project, the Central North Atlantic Marine Historical Ecology Project (CAMHEP), as well as provide an overview of the current overall state of marine fish zooarchaeological data from Iceland. CAMHEP will utilize marine zooarchaeological data from Icelandic archaeological sites dating from the first settlement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristian Kristiansen.

As exemplified by Viking and Bronze Age societies in northern Europe, we model the political dynamics of raiding, trading, and slaving as a maritime mode of production (MMP). It includes political strategies to control trade by owning boats and financing excursions, thus permitting chiefs to channel wealth flows and establish decentralized, expansive political networks. Such political institutions often form at edges of world systems, where chieftains support mobile warriors, who were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Byock.

This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Presents recent findings of the Mosfell Archaeological Project (MAP) in Iceland’s Mosfell Valley (Mosfellsdalur). Reviews excavations at Leiruvogur Bay at the coastal mouth of the valley and at Hrísbrú, the farmstead of the Mosfell chieftains. These two Viking Age sites formed a 10th century...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Steinman. Michele Hayeur Smith. Soumen Mallick.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North Atlantic islands were colonized by settlers from Norway and the British Isles in the ninth century, bringing agricultural practices from Northern Europe. Wool and fish dominated exports from Iceland from the Viking Age, although the impact of the wool trade remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Dwyer.

For decades, paleoethnobotanical research almost exclusively concentrated on reconstructing past subsistence economies. At 2011’s SAA conference, I presented a paper entitled, Toward A Paleoethnomedicine. I suggested that paleoethnobotanical research should take inspiration from ethnomedicine (a subfield of ethnobotany) and concentrate on analyzing past people’s healing practices and performances. This paper presents a method to operationalize this concept, a technique for analyzing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Cannell. Lars Gustavsen.

This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jellhaug, Norway, is Scandinavia’s second largest prehistoric mound. Dating from the (pre)Viking period, it has a long history of human interaction and interpretation. Built in phases with distinct, selected, and transformed earthly materials, the mound compares with contemporary mounds in that both the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Buchanan. Sarah Semple. Sue Harrington.

Early medieval Britain witnessed dramatic changes to the socio-cultural landscape due to the withdrawal of Roman authority, climatic change, and the arrival of migrants from the continent and from different regions of Britain. The analytical and scientific analysis of the burial record, from a landscape perspective, allows an investigation of key questions related to the scope and nature of this migration, the development of social identity, and how portions of Britain expanded from small...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Cartwright.

This is an abstract from the "Small Things Unforgotten" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Board games, from a psychological standpoint, have been seen as a reflection of skill, cunning, wisdom, and intelligence. Since most board games were developed in order to hone one’s skills in a certain area of life, the presence of them in graves should indicate a level of intellectual prowess. However, from an archaeological viewpoint, the presence of board...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Raffield.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Viking Age was a time of upheaval and disruption across the northern world. Beginning in the late eighth century CE, historical documents attest to a surge of viking raiding into western Europe. By the mid-ninth century, predatory raiding fleets are recorded as operating across the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Bond. Stephen Dockrill. Nicole Burton.

This is an abstract from the "Climate and Heritage in the North Atlantic: Burning Libraries" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Knowe of Swandro, (Orkney Islands, Scotland) was a large settlement occupied from around 800 BCE to CE 1200 and consists of Iron Age roundhouses, Pictish buildings, and a Viking/Norse settlement, much of which has already been lost to the sea. A substantial Iron Age roundhouse that had been occupied for many generations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramona Harrison.

Siglunes is one of a series of endangered sites in N Iceland where we investigate: the emergence and long-term development of Icelandic fisheries and marine mammal hunting, the changing connections between Eyjafjörður and the larger North Atlantic trade and exchange during the Viking Age and medieval times, processes of marine erosion and its effect on archaeological sites for heritage management efforts in Iceland and the wider region. The site’s archaeological and environmental samples can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramona Harrison.

This is an abstract from the "Accelerating Environmental Change Threats to Cultural Heritage: Serious Challenges, Promising Responses" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The combination of deep sea fishing and dried fish production, and its distribution to inland consumers, is a distinctive and largely Nordic contribution to European diet and economy of eventual global impact in the 14th -17th centuries. One of the main questions is how and when this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D'aundra Lewis.

For millennial alcohol has played a prevalent role in the development of communities and human interaction. Scotland is well known for the creation of whisky that made its way to America during the Colonial Period. The goal of this research is to identify the influence alcohol has had on the development of Scotland. Scotland whisky distribution has caused a change in laws, economics, health perspective, and tradition. According to Bill Walker, "Scotch whisky is more than a whisky. It is part of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Merit Hondelink.

This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeobotanical remains of several cesspits and wells from Delft were analyzed to determine if “preparation marks,” marks on plant remains resulting from specific preparation methods, are present and if these marks can be used to differentiate between kitchen refuse and consumption waste or excrement. By combining the results from archaeobotanical analysis with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Sanmark.

This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will address Viking-age ritual sites (cult sites assembly (thing) sites) in Scandinavia and Iceland from the perspective of their seasonality. These sites were used for gatherings of various kinds seemingly at certain points of the calendar year. Calendrical rituals formed a key part of Viking-age religion,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Knut Ivar Austvoll.

Along the northwestern coast of Scandinavia the reliance and utilisation of the sea set the stage for a more advanced sociopolitical organization. The technological innovations prompted by the Late Neolithic (i.e. ship technology), turned the sea into a connective arena of interaction and trade. This is seen with the widespread distribution of finely crafted Jutish flint daggers from Late Neolithic I, followed by a steady increase of metal, burial mounds, and settlement sites in Late Neolithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zenobie Garrett.

This is an abstract from the "On the Periphery or the Leading Edge? Research in Prehistoric Ireland" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Dún Ailinne (Knockaulin) in County Kildare is one of four major ceremonial sites of the Irish Iron Age. The site sits on a large, isolated hill in an otherwise flat landscape on which a large earthen bank and ditch encloses approximately 13 ha of land at the top. Excavations in the 1960s-1970s, as well as...