Svalbard (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
126-150 (166 Records)
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...
The Seasonality of Ritual Sites in Viking-Age Scandinavia and Iceland (2019)
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,...
Seaways to Complexity. Sociopolitical Strategies in Northwestern Scandinavia in the Early Bronze Age (2018)
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...
A Site with a View? A 3D Reconstruction of the Structures at Dun Ailinne (2019)
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...
Slave Ships of the Viking Age (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Viking ships were slave ships. Between 750 and 1100 CE, clinker-built vessels were used across Northern Europe on raids for collecting captives and transporting them on routes that linked the North Atlantic to Central Asia. We have extensive knowledge about these ships through a unique...
A Small Rock Holding Back the Waves (2018)
Islands are both understudied and spatially constrained, with often turbulent colonial histories. This paper reconsiders the conceptual basis of intra- and inter-island relationships in the context of archaeology. We argue that islands need not be isolated as geographic, ecologic or cultural entities and have not been so during the proto-historic and prehistoric periods. Using 21st century equilibrium theory and gateway theory we suggest that islands may be in some contexts central places. We...
The Strange Attraction of Viking-Age Urbanism: The Predicament of Emporia (2019)
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. Maritime trading emporia were nodal points of social networks and economic interactions in Viking-age Scandinavia. Despite their social centrality, archaeology shows that such places were rather small, unassuming, and sometimes short-lived settlement. This contrasts with a wealth of evidence pointing to communities...
Stylistic Inconsistency and Artistic Intent in Viking Age Oval Brooches (2019)
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 stylistic and thematic variation as seen in a sample of P51 type Viking Age (approx. AD 700-1100) oval brooches excavated mostly from burial contexts in central Sweden. As examples of applied art heavily reproduced through casting and imitation, paired oval brooches have the potential to reveal a great deal about how artisans perceived...
Subarctic Coastal Pioneers: Evidence and Implications of a New Maritime Archaic Site in Eastern Newfoundland (2017)
The earliest colonization of the island of Newfoundland was by a coastal and marine oriented people belonging to the Maritime Archaic tradition (ca. 8,000-3,200 B.P.). The exact timing and nature of that colonization and subsequent ‘settling in’ process remains largely unknown. Part of the reason for this is the dearth of well-dated, systematically excavated habitation sites on the island during the Archaic period. In the summer of 2016, our excavations at the Stock Cove site on the coast of...
Surviving Violence: Healthcare in the Danish Viking Age (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Systems of Care in Times of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Viking Era has been characterized as a time of great violence in both modern and historical accounts, however, little work has been done to analyze the cultural norms and practical considerations surrounding healthcare during the Viking Age. If Viking Age society was as violent as purported, it would have needed to have well-honed systems of care...
Sværholt, World War II History, and Archaeology (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What difference does an archaeological approach make to a period saturated by historical documents, photographic archives, and recordings of eyewitness accounts? Since 2011 a group of archaeologists have undertaken fieldwork at a World War II prisoner of war camp at Sværholt in Norway’s far north. The labor camp for Soviet prisoners was established in 1942 as...
Tales from the Trench: an analysis of artifacts salvaged from two Western Thule sites in Kotzebue, Alaska (2017)
Monitoring and salvage archaeology is often viewed as an anathema to the archaeological record. Nevertheless, both situations frequently occur within CRM contexts. Here, we present analyses of lithic material, organic tools, pottery, and fauna from two subsurface house features in Kotzebue, Alaska. Radiocarbon dates indicate that the two sites are roughly contemporaneous, dating to the end of the Medieval Warm Period, and are associated with the Western Thule tradition. The materials were...
Tales of Bronze Age People: A Transdisciplinary Look at the Mobility of Persons, Materials and Ideas in Nordic Bronze Age Denmark (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tales of Bronze Age People is a three-year (2018-2021) interdisciplinary research project supported by a Carlsberg Foundation Semper Ardens grant (CF18-0005) led by Karin Margarita Frei, Research Professor in Archaeometry at the National Museum of Denmark. The project investigates the dynamic ways in which people navigated social lives in the Early Nordic...
Taskscapes of Reindeer Herding: Changes in the Land-Use Dynamics and Campsite Organization of the Sámi Pastoralists of Northern Fennoscandia c. 700–1800 AD (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Domestication of reindeer commenced amongst the Sámi of northern Fennoscandia in the 8th century AD, and was accompanied by significant cultural changes. This presentation focuses on diachronic changes in the land-use, inter- and intra-site settlement patterns and human-environmental relations. I focus especially on two pivotal...
Testing Potential Archaeological Applications for Surficial Magnetic Susceptibility Probes in Shallow Depositional Environments: A Study from Agiak Lake in Alaska’s Brooks Range (2017)
Magnetic susceptibility (MS) is the measure of a material’s potential to hold a magnetic field, the variation of which can indicate anthropogenic forces acting upon a substrate. In Alaska, diachronic MS analyses have been useful when investigating environmental change and anthropogenic variation through time in deeply-stratified subarctic interior sites. Synchronic MS approaches, on the other hand, use surficial MS probe mapping to analyze contemporaneous variation across space and can reveal...
Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death: Co-Burials and Identity in Pre-Modern Northern Finland (2018)
This paper specifically addresses the cultural construction of children’s age and identity by examining the textiles and burial clothing from a series of pre-Modern mummified children’s burials recovered from beneath church floors in northern Finland. During the pre-modern era, children’s burials in pre-modern Finland take one of three forms: (1) alone, in individual coffins (2) in association with other burials but still in their own coffin (3) co-burial, in the same coffin as others. This...
A Thousand Years of Bone-Tool Production at Shaktoolik, Alaska (2017)
Osseous tools and debitage collected from three middens at the Shaktoolik Airport site during excavations in the summers of 2014 and 2015 were analyzed using the chaîne opératoire rather than a typological approach to assess site use over time. Relative frequencies of raw materials, tool types, and production debris were analyzed from different periods. The Early Thule/Proto-Yup’ik portion (ca. AD 1200) of the assemblage came from a midden associated with a men’s house (qasgiq), and is...
A ticking clock? Considerations for preservation, valuation and site management of Greenland’s coastal archaeology in the 21st century. (2017)
Documenting and evaluating the rate of deterioration at coastal archaeological sites presents a number of fundamental challenges in the Arctic. In Greenland for example, increasing soil temperatures, perennial thaws, coastal erosion, storm surges and pioneer plant species such as dwarf willow and dwarf birch are observed as increasingly detrimental to the long-term preservation of archaeological deposits and features found scattered along the country’s west coast and extensive inner fjord...
Togiak Archaeological and Paleoecological Project: Exploring Relationships and Ecology at the Old Togiak Village (2017)
The Togiak Archaeological and Paleoecological Project (TAPP) is a collaborative project driven by the Togiak community of southwest Alaska and their interests in documenting past lifeways at the Old Togiak Village. During the summer of 2015 The University of Montana conducted field work at the site using surface and sub-surface mapping to guide a non-invasive core sampling technique across the village, led by Dr. Kristen Barnett (Bates College). Thirty-five core samples were collected from a...
Toward a social archaeology of food in later Newfoundland pre/history (2017)
Archaeologists have long been interested in understanding and modelling subarctic hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies. Traditionally, much of this work has relied on the ethnographic record for analogy and sought to situate forager decision making processes in terms of the calculus of optimal foraging and adaptations to the natural environment. While useful, these approaches risk flattening pre/historic subsistence strategies to the point of timelessness and minimizing the social and cultural...
Towards an Archaeology of Prows - An Ontological Approach to Geoglyphs and Petroglyphs in the North European Bronze Age (2018)
This paper will explore the relationship between animated boat prows in different stone media - petroglyphs and geoglyphs - from an ontological perspective. It explores chronological changes in these media and argues for both similarities and differences in how stones participated in unfolding peoples' life-worlds or worldings during the north European Bronze Age.
Transdisciplinary Analysis of Marine Mammal Use in the Norse North Atlantic and Subarctic (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. This ongoing project, funded in 2015 by Anna Kerttula and the Arctic Social Sciences Program, uses historical, literary, aDNA, ZooMS, and archaeological data to identify patterns in marine mammal exploitation across the North Atlantic and Subarctic from ca. 800 -1800 CE. With over 230 samples of archaeological whale bone...
Traversing the Great Forest: Work and Mobility in Sweden’s Premodern Farmscape (2019)
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. Most of pre-modem Sweden comprised wooded uplands lying outside more densely populated 'civilized' regions. Often collectively called The Great Forest, this territory stretched from south-central to the high north, where Scandinavian, Finnish, and Sami people often lived in close proximity....
Two Valleys Archaeology in an Environmental Humanities Context (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. This talk discusses the challenges of connecting the currently ongoing Two Valleys Project in Iceland to various scales of research on human ecodynamics of the past and global challenges we face in our time. This interdisciplinary project expands on previous research into human-nature interactions within various marine and...
Understanding the “Local Scale” in Pictish Landscape Research (Northern Scotland, 300–900 CE) (2023)
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...