Ireland (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
701-725 (1,101 Records)
Archaeological landscapes are complex three-dimensional environments, containing not only cadastral survey units and evidence of sites in the form of artifact scatters, but also anomalous topographical features and standing architectural remains of a variety of periods, types, and states of preservation. The time-consuming nature of careful architectural recording and the difficulty of acquiring the high-quality geodata required for a proper architectural survey in the remote countryside have...
News from the Register of Professional Archaeologists-EAA Conference Review (1999)
The Fifth Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) was held in Bournemouth, England, September 15th to 19th, 1999. Berle Clay and I attended as representatives of the Register of Professional Archaeologists. Presently, European archaeology is very similar to our own experiences in the middle 1970s and early 1980s, but yet it is unique and diverse in so many ways. Areas of concern to European archaeologists sound all too familiar: how to define significance, the need for...
No Man Is an Island: Death and Burial on the Island of Haffjarðarey (2018)
During the 13th century Iceland became a major hub of the North Atlantic fishing industry sparking international conflict over fishing rights between mercantile interests from Norway, Denmark, England, the Netherlands and Northern Germany. From ca. 1200 - 1563 the Catholic Church and cemetery on the island of Haffjarðarey served as the burial place for the large geographic region of Eyjahreppur in western Iceland. The church and cemetery were closed during the Lutheran Reformation and the...
Non-adult Dis/ability and Care in Early Medieval Britain (2018)
A child who is unwell or physically impaired naturally causes concern and anxiety for his or her parents/carers. For many in today’s modern society, accessible medical care means that the challenges associated with caring for a sick or disabled child can be overcome or, at least, minimized. But how did parents/carers respond and adapt to the demands of ill-health and physical impairment in children during the early medieval period? In seeking to address this question, this paper will explore...
Norse Exploitation of Wooden Resources in North America: Determining Wood Provenance Using Isotopic Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SANNA v2.2: Case Studies in the Social Archaeology of the North and North Atlantic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From historic sources we know the inhabitants of the North Atlantic islands relied on importations of timber from Northern Europe in order to supplement their resource deficit. In the case of the Greenland Settlements, we know Norse Greenlanders organized expeditions to North American shores where they...
Norse Textiles at the Western Edge of the North Atlantic. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anna Kertulla’s vision of Arctic research incorporated a desire to see female scholars succeed and work on issues pertaining to women’s lives in the North. Three NSF-funded grants from Arctic Social Sciences, focusing on textiles as women’s production, used over 1500 textiles from Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, and Scotland...
The North Sea and the "Long" Viking Age: Connections and Communication (2017)
This talk presents the results of a northern European collaborative pilot study on the compilation and analysis of internationally-derived datasets of metal-detected material culture. Drawing on nascent heritage initiatives across northern Europe designed to protect and record our at-risk portable material culture, the project seeks to develop and trial a methodology for the synthesis and analysis of metal-detected datasets from England, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands, resulting in the...
Northern Norway’s sea of islands: processes of maritime colonization and settlement (2017)
Epeli Hau’ofa’s (1993) perception of Oceania as a ‘sea of islands’ is a useful point of departure for exploring the long-term trajectories of the many thousands of islands scattered along the coast of northwestern Norway. Hau’ofa’s vision of joined islands is also instructive as a way of emphasizing seaborne connectivity rather than insularity within maritime archaeology. This paper highlights problems related to island colonization and settlement since the Early Mesolithic (11,500-10,000 BP) in...
The Northern way – Conceptualization of Nonhuman Animals in the Animal Art of 5-6th century Norway (2017)
The presentation takes up a northern way of expression opposed to a southern one – namely the stylistic depiction and focus on animals and mixed animal/human designs prevailing in the Nordic Barbaric area opposed to a focus on the naturalistic ideal of the human body throughout the classical world. The complexity and continuity of this Nordic art form indicates that it was structurally incorporated in an overarching principle that reflects social and cosmic order. The mixed animal-human designs...
Nossa Senhora do Freixo, Portugal: A Late Antiquity Roman Basilica and the Continued Reuse of Sacred Space (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at the Late Antiquity Roman Basilica of Nossa Senhora do Freixo, Portugal, provide insight into the surprising significance of this hinterland community within the southern Iberian Peninsula. Recent excavations have revealed architectural components and compositional trappings associated with a center of regional affluence. Imported utilitarian...
Not Going There: Seeing, Depicting and Interpreting Archaeological Topography through Digital Media (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores a tension in field practice and interpretation in landscape archaeology. Digital 3D topographic data have proliferated, and the increasing availability of lidar DTMs are transforming the practice of archaeological topographic interpretation. As a toolkit for interpretation tailored to this digital medium is being...
The Not Very Patrilocal European Neolithic (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two decades of strontium isotope and aDNA research on Central European Neolithic cemetery populations have consistently interpreted patrilocality, which is now a foregone conclusion. This paper questions those interpretations from a social anthropological perspective. Models are presented for interpreting strontium isotope ratios and aDNA that consider the...
Objects of Adaptation: The Role of Play Objects in Adaptation to Environmental Change in the North Atlantic Islands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present a comparative analysis of Norse and Thule play objects and practices (i.e., toys and games) in the North Atlantic islands, focusing on their role in enculturation and information transmission between generations. When considered together with environmental records, this information offers insights into processes...
Obsidian Characterization at the McMaster Archaeological XRF Laboratory: Case-Studies from the Italian Island of Sardinia (2017)
The McMaster Archaeological X-ray Fluorescence Laboratory (MAX Lab) was established in 2010 with the goal of using compositional analyses of archaeological objects to engage with broad-level questions about past human behavior. In this context, obsidian has been the primary artifact type analyzed, taking form through the sourcing of artifacts to the geological sources from which they originated. As an example, this presentation focuses on prehistoric obsidian exploitation on the central...
Odyssey Sensing Project (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Survey is an important tool in archaeological research. It allows us to identify the location of potential archaeological sites as well as understand the main natural features of the landscape. Lately, methodological developments in the field of remote detection have significantly contributed with new applications to archaeological research. The Odyssey...
Of Fish and Plague: Death as Economic Opportunity at the Medieval Fishing Station of Gufuskálar, Iceland (2018)
The high morbidity (50% or greater) of Iceland’s Black Death in 1404 C.E. disrupted a rigidly hierarchical Icelandic social order and led to an inability to enforce social and legal constraints on Iceland’s labor classes. This newly untethered and mobile lower class searched for avenues for wealth creation previously unavailable. One avenue, in the century following Iceland’s Black Death, was through fishing and fish exports. During this period, previously tightly restricted fish exports...
Of Monsters and Men: Material Culture, Movement, and Symbolism at Surtshellir, a Western Icelandic Viking Age Ritual Site (2021)
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. Over the course of 850 years, Surtshellir—a massive lava cave in western Iceland’s rugged interior—was variously described as a geological wonder, a shelter for outlaws, an abode of ghosts and spirits, a tourist's dream, a place of torture, the wilderness, an archaeological...
Old Deities for New Men? The Social, Cultural and Political Role of Religion and Ritual Practices during the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age Transitional Period on Crete (2017)
It is generally assumed that the Minoan Goddess remained venerated on Crete after the destruction of the Minoan and Mycenaean Palaces. In the Late Bronze Age, in the aftermath of the collapse of the palatial system, freestanding bench sanctuaries housing large terra-cotta female figures with uplifted arms and their ritual vessels appeared in a series of newly founded Cretan sites. Since their typical gesture recalls Minoan scenes allegedly representing the epiphany of a female divinity, these...
Old Fences and Archeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fences form distinct patterns and are a prominent feature of most cultural landscapes. Such patterns contain information about people and their relationship with the land. Archeological mapping of extensive Viking Age fences in Iceland highlights the need for a theory of fence construction. How...
On Grounding ‘Margins’ and ‘Marginals’: With Brief Visits to the Bennachie Colony (Scotland) and New Iceland (Canada) (2017)
Marginality is a perennial trope within the literature of settler societies. This paper is concerned with how people, past and present, become caught up with labels of ‘marginality’, among other forms of ‘identity history’. The theory is grounded in what are potentially conflicting ideas: one that places emphasis on fluidity and change, the other which takes a firm materialist stand. The apparent impasse is resolved by clearly identifying contexts—both material and historical—where temporary...
On some classical roots of the Anthropocene: where does Mediterranean archaeology belong? (2017)
In the long run-up to deciding the Anthropocene’s scientific status there have been few archaeological voices, as many have noted, revealing the proposed epoch’s narrow periodization of human-environment relationships. None seem to be more absent than classical archaeologists, an omission which reflects not only disciplinary cleavages but also tacit conceits about the classical world as paradoxically generative of and divorced from modern geopolitics and human-nature interfaces. From the early...
On the Margin, Marginal Too? A Western Outpost of Paleolithic Cantabrian Cave Art (NW Iberia) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Franco-Cantabrian group of cave art ranks among the best known examples of Paleolithic symbolic behavior. For more than a century no decorated cave was reported beyond the Nalón Valley in the center of Asturias, until the carvings and paintings from Cova Eirós were discovered. At more than 100 km from the Nalón,...
On the reconstruction of aisled prehistoric houses from an engineering point of view (2007)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
On we sweep with thrashing oar: Interaction networks in Aegean Prehistory (2017)
Prior to the introduction of sailing technology during the 3rd millennium BCE, communication and movement throughout the Aegean Basin was greatly shaped by the region’s mixed landscape of open sea, island clusters, and mountainous interiors. Modeling the physical landscape and accounting for travel rates and physical restrictions to travel over both land and sea, I examine the nature of movement across the Aegean during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (6500-2000 BCE). Based on these...
The Ontological Mammoth Body: Varieties of the Human-Mammoth Ritual Drama Mediated by Cultural Interactions with Mammoth Remains in Pavlonian Moravia and Mezinian Ukraine (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric sources show hunters burnt the bones of prey or hung them on trees, heaped them on piles, deposited them in bogs, etc., in order to propitiate nature spirits such as the “Master of Animals” for game resurrection...