Svalbard (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Hansen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The material record of Late Antique and Early Medieval northeastern Britain (ca. 300–900 CE) consists largely of monuments and obtrusive settlements attributed to the people known as the Picts. While features of the landscape from this period, such as the distinctive Pictish symbol stones, have been studied both in isolation and with respect to their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Alix. Owen Mason. Lauren Norman.

Birnirk culture is well-known for driftwood structures that were repeatedly re-assembled to form low mounds. The structures were "hopeless tangle[s] of logs" to pioneering 1930s archaeologists whose reports lack details on construction techniques. Birnirk houses diverge from the preceding Old Bering Sea and later Thule single room houses with lengthy entrance tunnels. Our 2016 fieldwork "followed the wood," employing enhanced photography within two exceptionally preserved houses at Cape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rhiannon Stevens. Hazel Reade. Sophy Charlton. Jennifer Tripp.

Human mobility and environmental interactions at the end of the Palaeolithic were undoubtedly influenced by large-scale and rapid climate change. With the melting of ice sheets and expansion/contraction of ecosystems, new landscapes and resources became available to late and final Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. The UP-NORTH project is examining the dispersal of people and animals into Northern Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum. Using a range of techniques, including stable isotopes,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Brody. Andrew Bair.

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. This paper addresses the value of an integrated geophysical survey approach, which includes the application of GPR, DGPS, and magnetic gradiometry, to identify archaeological areas of occupation non-invasively. This approach was applied to RathMaol, as part of a larger ongoing research project,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Scott. Adam Boethius. Rebecca Macdonald. Michael Richards. Amy Styring.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study, we present the results of compound specific carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis on amino acids from bone collagen of Early Holocene humans and contemporaneous terrestrial and marine fauna recovered from multiple sites in southern Sweden. These analyses were aimed at individuals spanning the Early Mesolithic to the Middle Neolithic Pitted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Ryan.

Management and dissemination of data has long been a challenge for archaeologists, and this challenge has increased in recent years with demands from various funding agencies for data management plans. Additionally, querying the complex datasets generated often results in iterative rounds of SQL code creation as each answer raises further questions. Online analytical processing (OLAP), a tool for multi-dimensional analysis used by many private companies for reporting, management, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pam Crabtree. Douglas Campana.

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. The development of urbanism in northwestern Europe has been of interest to medieval archaeologists and historians since the days of Henry Pirenne, and these questions have been central to anthropological archaeology throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the critical features of early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Caretta. Finn Ole Nielsen. Michael Thorsen. Poul Otto Nielsen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Vasagård site is located on the southern side of the island of Bornholm, Denmark. Vasagård is separated by the 100m Læså valley from two nearly identical Neolithic sites and consists of a tomb system where a dolmen and a passage grave can be found close to the settlement. The grave system and causewayed enclosures are dated from 3500 BC., and constitute the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gwen Bakke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study examines human-animal relations in the context of a Viking Age (9th to 11th century) port of trade and farming settlement of Ridanäs located in Gotland, Sweden. The objective is to gain an understanding of inter- and intra-site interactions through the faunal data. The primary questions focus on subsistence strategies, trade connections,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Steinberg.

The rapid settlement of Iceland has a distinct beginning, but defining the end of the settlement turns out to be difficult. While there are anecdotal stories of earlier settlers, the beginning of large-scale migration to Iceland seems to happen in about AD 870, at the start of Harald Fairhair’s reign, and the time of a distinct volcanic ash layer. The landnám, or land-grab is an important template for our understanding of movements into new landscapes, from the Neolithic Revolution, to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Alonzi. Barra O'Donnabhain.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diet, mobility, and trauma are key factors in the performance of social identities and the maintenance of social boundaries between groups. In medieval Ireland, burial at monasteries also provided an opportunity for both lay and ecclesiastical communities to represent the religious identities of deceased individuals. In this study, mobility, trauma, and diet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Jensen.

Walakpa is an iconic Arctic site with spectacular preservation, due to frozen conditions. Although many believe it to have been fully excavated, Stanford was only able to reach a third of the way to sterile soil due to permafrost, so earlier occupations of the site remain unstudied. Long considered stable, Walakpa began eroding rapidly in 2013. A single recent storm removed over 30 meters of cultural stratigraphy along a 100+ meter front. Need for rapid response prompted a large volunteer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Britta Spaulding.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Industrial archaeology has been defined in the anthropological literature of the last several decades to analyze the period, related archaeological record, and resultant and surrounding socioeconomic changes of western industrialization—the establishment of large-scale manufacturing—from 1800 CE to the present. In considering a "movement" such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genevieve LeMoine.

Miniature carvings recovered from Paleo-Inuit Dorset culture sites (2800-700 BP) across the Canadian Arctic and northwestern Greenland offer tantalizing glimpses of human-animal relations of this prehistoric group. Recently scholars such as Matt Betts and Mari Hardenberg have begun a productive line of inquiry drawing on representational ecology to contextualize and enrich understanding of the social nature of these relationships and the symbolic role of the carvings of polar bears in particular...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kaplan.

In 1978 archaeologists partially excavated a frozen Middle Dorset Paleoeskimo midden on Avayalik Island, a far outer island at the tip of Labrador, Canada’s uninhabited northern coast. They recovered hundreds of organic artifacts unlike any found in Labrador’s other Middle Dorset sites, which contain only lithic tools. Faunal remains suggested a North Atlantic quite different from that of the present day. In 2016 Kaplan returned to Avayalik and documented the ongoing destruction of the site....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Wolff.

The importance of alcohol in the landscape of feasting has been well documented across cultures, and early medieval Europe is no exception. The mead-hall in Anglo-Saxon Britain functioned as a location where social bonds were strengthened both vertically and horizontally; Vikings in Iceland relied on barley beer to demonstrate the power and generosity of chieftains. Production of alcohol in the large quantities required for feasting necessitates some degree of specialization, but to what degree...