North Atlantic (Geographic Keyword)
476-500 (583 Records)
Wood fragments
The Human Experience of Social Transformation: Cross-Cultural Insights from Qualitative Comparative Analysis - Data (2018)
These data accompany the Hegmon and Peeples manuscript entitled "The Human Experience of Social Transformation: Cross-Cultural Insights from Qualitative Comparative Analysis" Archaeologists and other scholars have long studied the causes of collapse and other major social transformations and debated how they can be understood. This article instead focuses on the human experience of living through those transformations, analyzing 18 transformation cases from the US Southwest and the North...
The Human Experience of Social Transformations in the North Atlantic and US Southwest (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. Archaeologists and other scholars have long studied the causes of collapse and other major social transformations and debated how they can be understood. This paper instead focuses on the human experience of living through those transformations, analyzing 18 transformation cases from the North Atlantic and the US Southwest....
Human Interment and Making Memory in Viking Age Iceland (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. Over 300 Viking Age (AD 871–1000) human interments are known from Iceland, many with accompanying dogs and horses. Though these interments are similar to those of elites in Scandinavia, inhumation burial in Iceland apparently served a different purpose — to demarcate boundaries in a landscape devoid of...
The Icelandic Cooperative Movement: Constitutive Practices and Localized Influences (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Governance and Globalization in the North Atlantic", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the late 19th century, farmers in Þíngeyjarsýsla, Northern Iceland collectively organized in order to claim greater sovereignty over their interactions with international capitalist markets in an economic scene dominated by Danish merchants. This Kaupfélag movement soon became an island-wide phenomenon. This paper...
Imagined Forests: Woodlands and Wood Resources in Medieval Icelandic Literary, Documentary and Archaeological Sources (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. Medieval literary sources describe the Icelandic landscape when the first settlers arrived as ‘forested from the mountains to the shores’. It had previously been thought that the island was rapidly deforested after settlement, but recent research gives a much more nuanced picture of woodland history. It...
Imagining Kotið: Artistic Visualization as Archaeological Practice (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Small Dwellings on the Viking Frontier: New Research from Kotið, North Iceland" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster offers an artistic visualization of the Viking Age dwelling at Kotið, North Iceland. Based on geospatial data and photogrammetry collected in 2022 and 2023, the rendering demonstrates how this structure differs from previously excavated turf dwellings in Viking Age Iceland. Its small size,...
The Importance of Specialized Use Sites in the Settlement History of Iceland (2023)
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. Sandvík, located in the Westfjords of Iceland, seems to have been a seasonally utilized site focused primarily on winter fishing and fish processing. The site is situated directly on the coast, quite near to the main farm of Bær, and dates to very early in the settlement period of Iceland, which began around AD 877. Even...
Invisible Women in a World of Men: The Textile Trade in the North Atlantic, AD 1000–1600 (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. Waterlogged or deeply buried deposits from medieval harbors in certain northern European towns have produced large and well-preserved textile assemblages that contain a surprising number of non-indigenous textiles. Some of these appear to have originated in the North...
Iron Production at Marginal Settlements in Northern Iceland (2018)
The environment of Iceland was rapidly and severely affected by the Norse Settlement, in particular by deforestation. In Iceland’s changing environment the production of iron, an essential material, became limited not by access to iron ore but by availability of wood to make charcoal fuel. The large-scale production of iron may be one of the primary processes that led to deforestation in Iceland due to the large need for charcoal. Investigations at Stekkjarborg on the farm of Keldudalur in...
Kotið: An Integrated Geoarchaeological Investigation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Small Dwellings on the Viking Frontier: New Research from Kotið, North Iceland" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Kotið, in Skagafjörður, northern Iceland, consists of several interposed components ranging from medieval outbuildings to a small dwelling from the first period of settlement in the region (ca. 870–930 CE). To understand how the inhabitants of Kotið constructed and reconstructed the buildings...
Long-term Impact of Settlement Location on Economic Status: A Geospatial Analysis in Skagafjörður, Iceland (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes Above and Below in Northern Contexts (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Environmental resources are unevenly distributed, but does differential access have long-term effects on relative economic status? During Iceland's settlement in the 9th and 10th centuries, all of the island's agriculturally productive lowlands were claimed by powerful settlers. These large land claims were...
Managing Wooden Resources in Norse Greenland: Using Tree-Rings to Explore Wood Use and Acquisition Strategies in a “Treeless” Environment (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During medieval times, Norse Greenlanders relied heavily on wood for making household items, as a construction material, and as a fuel source. Although the quantity and quality of timber available in local woodlands were limited, Norse craftspeople also had access to driftwood and imported materials. Most studies in the North Atlantic use taxonomic...
The Missing Medieval in the North Atlantic (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in the North Atlantic has overwhelmingly focused on the long-term political and environmental impacts of the Viking Age colonization of these remote, marginal islands. In places like Iceland, these impacts were profound and resulted in the radical transformation of the previously...
A Movement at the Margins: An Icelandic Rural Transformation at the Edge of the 19th Century Atlantic World (2018)
In the early modern Atlantic World, core/periphery mercantile economics ascribed a marginal place for Iceland. The island's role in trade involved the production of low-cost bulk goods destined for markets mostly via Denmark into the 19th century. The focal area of this paper, the rural and upland Mývatn region, was in some ways socially and ecologically marginal even within Iceland. The growing environment was affected by unpredictable cold weather while volatile erosion zones hemmed local...
NABO Artifacts
Project for artifact data from Norse sites across the North Atlantic islands, including Iceland, Greenland, and Shetland.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Pervasive Landscapes of Inequality: Want and Abundance within a Hyperobject (2018)
As globalization matures, environmental, social, and economic factors continue to create ever-expanding landscapes of inequality. Among these drivers, human-driven environmental degradation has, for centuries, operated as a significant producer of inequality. Anthropogenic climate change today perpetuates and strengthens these multi-generational, regional-scale phenomena of landscape change. These processes, such as sediment erosion in Iceland during the past millennium, create a ‘second nature’...
Political Ecology Materialized in a Medieval Icelandic Landscape (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Past ecological and political-economic changes are embedded in the materiality of the landscape, and investigating correlations between such changes can suggest how relationships between ecology and economy were structured and managed within past societies. Iceland was first settled in the late ninth century by wealthy...
Reconsidering Cereal Production and Consumption in the North Atlantic: A case study from Northern Iceland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Viking Age, the Norse settled Iceland, a sub-arctic volcanic island at the climatic margin of cereal production. These settlers brought with them a distinctive subsistence economy involving animal husbandry and cereal production, most notably barley. Barley (Hordeum vulgare) has been noted by...