Svalbard (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (166 Records)
Archaeological fish remains are more taphonomically sensitive than those of other vertebrates as they are typically smaller and less biomineralised. Therefore, it is essential to retrieve as much information as possible from assemblages that favour their preservation. One of the most time- and cost-efficient methods of objectively achieving faunal identity in ancient bone is collagen fingerprinting technique ‘ZooMS’ (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry). ZooMS harnesses the potential of...
Covering Bones: The Archaeology of Respect on the Kazan River, Nunavut (2017)
Complex relationships between people and animals define life in the northern past. For Inuit these relationships are manifested in many ways; particularly in practices that are often described as "showing respect" for animals, thus promoting stable relations between animal and human societies. Frustratingly, many of these activities, which are so prominent in the ethnographic record, have few archaeological correlates. Here, we examine one important practice with a relatively high level of...
Creating Diasporic Scandinavian Identities in Viking Age Iceland (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. The Viking Age migrations that settled the North Atlantic resulted in a diaspora, creating a series of colonies that looked back to Scandinavia for their shared historical identity. This paper focuses on the diasporic experience in Iceland and the formation of a new Icelandic ethnic identity....
The Cross in the North: Pictish Christianization in Light of the Northern European Experience (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. Christianization in Northern Europe’s first millennium CE has been intensively studied by numerous disciplines and is often viewed as a cause or outcome of social, political, and economic changes. Christianity arrived at different times through differing processes, far better understood in some...
Cult and Cultivation: Vulnerability and Resilience on Inishark Island, Co. Galway, Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (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. Critics of new materialism caution that focus on the active qualities of materials and the distributed agency of assemblages obscures the cruelties of inequality that allow the powerful to do as they will and others to suffer what they must. Engaging such critiques, this paper examines the famines in nineteenth-century...
Cutmarks on Prehistoric Alcidae Tibiotarsi in the Rat Islands, Aleutian Islands, Alaska (2017)
The Rat Islands Research Project (2009-2014) examined pre-contact era Aleut/Unangan archaeological sites on Hawadax and Kiska Islands to test hypotheses about Aleut impacts on and intersections with the environment. The 2003 test excavations at RAT-081 on Hawadax Islands resulted in the recovery of more than 6,000 remarkably well-preserved faunal specimens, which date from 2500 to 250 years ago and include fish, sea mammal, and bird species. The 2104 test excavation at KIS-050 on Kiska Island...
The Daily Grind: Trends in Grinding Stone Use in Eastern Tigrai from 1600 BCE to Modern Times (2017)
A morphological investigation of grinding stones recovered from the Northern Ethiopian site of Mezber revealed changes through time that likely were made to increase efficiencies. The need for efficiency may have been due to increasing needs (e.g. larger populations, an increasing reliance on grains in the diet, a desire to reduce grinding times). Through the phases at Mezber the archaeological evidence suggests a change in the quantity of grinding stones. The growing numbers of recovered...
Dependent Independence? Identity, Interconnection, and Isolation in Iceland (AD 870-1800) (2017)
This paper will explore intersections among international trade, domestic economy, and identity in Iceland from the time of its settlement shortly before AD 870 until its quest for post-colonial, independent nation status in the late-19th century. Focusing primarily on three periods—the Viking Age: AD 870-1050, the medieval/Sturlung period: ca. AD 1150-1300, and the Early Modern era, ca. 1500-1800—this presentation will integrate archaeological data gleaned from a range of recent projects with...
The Diachronic Landscape of Ceremony at the Irish "Royal" Site of Dun Ailinne (2018)
The site of Dún Ailinne (Knockaulin) in County Kildare is one of four major ceremonial sites of the Irish Iron Age. Although numerous ceremonial centers of various size dotted the Irish landscape, Dún Ailinne, along with Teamhair (Tara), Emain Macha (Navan Fort), and Crúachain (Rathcroghan,) stand out due to their size and location. These characteristics indicate that the sites would have been major foci of ceremonial activity, and would have impacted the ceremonial activity itself. Although...
Driftwood, a Lifeline in the Arctic: Production of Artifacts from Driftwood in Northwest Iceland and Norse Greenland (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. Iceland was settled by the Norse in the late ninth century and Greenland was settled from Iceland around AD 1000. Although these countries are quite dissimilar in landscape and geology, they have a similar flora in which the only forest-forming tree is birch. Birch alone...
Ecohistories of Settlement of the Community of Svalbarð, Northeast Iceland (2017)
The Archaeology of Settlement and Abandonment of Svalbarð research program has reconstructed chronologies of settlement movements on the Svalbarð estate (extreme north-east Iceland), from the 9th to the 19th century AD, as well as their environmental and socio-economic contexts. Settlement expansions occurred in the 10th to 13th and the 18th to 19th centuries AD, interspersed with waves of widespread abandonment after ca. 1300 and 1800. Analyses of amended soils and of soil and air temperature...
The Ecology and Physical Properties of Gathered Plants in Cordage and Textiles in Prehistoric Scotland (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the last 30 years of ancient textile and cordage research, new and revisited archaeological evidence and ethnographic studies have shown that prehistoric people in Europe were using a wider range of plant species to produce cordage, netting, mats, and textiles than previously thought. This...
Environmental Threats To Viking Age and Medieval Norse Sites in Southwestern Greenland (2019)
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. This presentation is one of the products of a series of ongoing inter-connected, international, interdisciplinary fieldwork projects coordinated by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) research cooperative since 2005 in Greenland. The projects drew upon more than a...
Environmental Variation and the Sustainability of Farms: Investigating Effects of Erosion in Northern Iceland (2018)
The initial colonization of Iceland in the late 9th century had a profound impact on the fragile environment of the North Atlantic island. Settlement and the introduction of livestock resulted in widespread erosion and the replacement of woodlands with meadows and heaths. Changes in the environment are assumed to have played a role in determining settlement patterning and subsistence strategies. While marginal highland areas were most seriously affected, resulting in farmstead abandonment, the...
Experimental archaeology: replicas and reconstructions (2009)
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...
Experiments on clothing – revealing more than expected (2009)
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...
Explaining Variation in the Scale of Neolithic Quarry and Mine Production (2018)
In recent years new methods have been developed for using summed radiocarbon probabilities as a population proxy and for comparing radiocarbon datasets to establish whether they are significantly different from one another, while taking into account sampling variation and the patterns in the calibration curve. On the basis of newly collected and updated radiocarbon data on the dating of Neolithic mines and quarries in in Britain, Ireland and continental Northwest Europe, the paper will present...
EXPLORING THE DEVELOPMENT AND SPREAD OF ARCTIC MARITIME TRADITIONS THROUGH BAYESIAN RADIOCARBON ANALYSIS (2017)
To address the question of why arctic maritime traditions developed and spread in the North American Arctic during the mid- to late Holocene, we applied Bayesian analysis to a large radiocarbon database (n = 1202) for northwest Alaska and the Bering Strait region. We used Oxcal to create and analyze demographic patterns in summed probability distributions. We also used Bayesian calibration models to clarify the probable timings and durations of cultural phases and key transitions in the...
Feeding Medieval Towns: The Zooarchaeological Evidence (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Provisioning played a critical role in the establishment of early medieval towns in northwestern Europe from the eighth through the tenth centuries CE. Zooarchaeology can reveal how the inhabitants of early medieval towns obtained meat and other animal products. Recent zooarchaeological research has revealed how the...
Feeding Stonehenge: The Potential of Coprolites as Tools for Reconstructing Diet (2018)
The Feeding Stonehenge project combined zooarchaeology with pottery residue analysis to explore the diets and provisioning of the inhabitants of Neolithic Durrington Walls, the settlement associated with the construction of the iconic Stonehenge monument in southern Britain. A lack of preserved plant remains at the site, and an overwhelming dominance of porcine and ruminant lipids in the pottery, suggests that animal products were the major source of nutrition. This research tests this...
Female Warriors of the Viking Age (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In my presentation I will explore how women in the Viking age contributed to acts of violence by looking into three different cases of burials containing women with weapons and armaments. I will draw these studies from my original Master’s thesis published in 2017 and focus solely on the archaeological evidence,...
Finder-Collectors: Untapped Potential for Collaborative Engaged Scholarship (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Avocationals including metal detectorists can be defined as finder-collectors. This includes people who keep collections, including objects they have themselves found, but also possibly objects that they have acquired through purchasing, swapping, gifting, or by other means. This category expressly does not include people who loot but does include...
The Follo Railroad Environmental Monitoring Project in Medieval Oslo, Norway (2018)
In conjunction with a large urban infrastructure project, renewing the Norwegian railroad through the listed monument of the Medieval town of Oslo, an environmental monitoring programme was established. The Medieval town consists of extensive archaeological remains preserved in situ. The monitoring programme focusses on the following questions: What is the influence of building an encased railroad next to a medieval monument? How are the unsaturated conditions influenced next to the new...
From caribou to seal: The implications of changes in subsistence focus from Birnirk to Thule at Cape Espenberg (2017)
The widespread Birnirk culture is considered the source of the Thule and modern Inuit peoples across the arctic, based largely on legacy data from the 1930s to 1960s. Nonetheless, the archaeology of the Birnirk culture is understudied, with a 1970s archaeofaunal study near Barrow framing the culture as ringed seal specialists who depleted local seal populations and were forced to migrate northward. This proposition is called into question by our excavation of two houses in 2016 at Cape Espenberg...
Fur hat for northern climates (2006)
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...