Svalbard (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
76-100 (166 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nature of the relationship between the living and the dead as seen through funerary rites is central to many aspects of archaeological interpretation. Indeed, this was the focus of early processual/postprocessual debates, with the former seeing a “real,” if distorted, connection...
Living with Reindeer in Arctic Siberia: the View from Arctic Yamal, Russia (2017)
Reindeer are an essential part of daily life and special events across a broad stretch of northern Eurasia, but their long term history with people has remained elusive. Ethnographers have characterized reindeer as living in ‘intermittent co-existence’ with humans, or as ‘semi-domesticates’, ‘pastoral herd animals’, and even ‘slaves’. Archaeology has struggled to characterize human-reindeer relationships, with even the geographical origins of modern domesticated deer remaining unclear. The Yamal...
Long-Term Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Sámi Reindeer Husbandry on the Northern Shore of Europe (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Long-Term Pastoral Dynamics: Methods, Theories, Stories" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reindeer hunting, reindeer husbandry, and nomadic pastoralism form a significant part of the history of Sápmi, and the whole northern Fennoscandia from the late Iron Age to modern times. Sápmi, situated on the northern shore of Europe, is the transnational homeland of Sámi people, Europe’s only indigenous group. Recent...
Man does not go naked: Textilien und Handwerk aus afrikanischen und anderen Ländern; Festschrift für Renée Boser-Sarivaxévanis (1989)
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...
Manufacturing reality: Inuit harvesting depictions and the domestication of human-animal relations (2017)
Schematic harvesting scenes incised on tools are a stock variety of both precontact and historic Inuit graphic art. They sometimes seem to depict historically specific events, which they effectively commemorate, and have real (sometimes precise) informational content that must have been important for the dissemination of technical harvesting knowledge among a hunter’s peers, and its inter-generational transfer. However, the harvesting setups – such as a boatload of hunters on the verge of...
Mapping Midgard: Reconstructing Mental Geographies of Viking Age Seafarers (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project aims to reconstruct the mental geographies and sailing routes used by Viking Age communities along the Atlantic façade by combining experimental archaeology and critical cartography. This session will present some of the results of recent fieldwork conducted in Norway and...
Marginal Lives and Fractured Families. The Hidden Archaeology of Household Debt and Instability in Medieval Iceland (2018)
Archaeologists generally assume that the absence of market exchange implies an absence of financial debt as a mechanism of exchange and social control found in more "advanced" economies. This implicit logic is reproduced in contexts where identifying market exchange largely relies on tracking the circulation of specialized and imported goods, as is the case in medieval Iceland: a society largely made up of subsistence tenant farmers where archaeological indicators of market exchange virtually...
Marine Fish Zooarchaeological Data from Iceland and the Central North Atlantic Marine Historical Ecology Project (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will discuss a new NSF-funded project, the Central North Atlantic Marine Historical Ecology Project (CAMHEP), as well as provide an overview of the current overall state of marine fish zooarchaeological data from Iceland. CAMHEP will utilize marine zooarchaeological data from Icelandic archaeological sites dating from the first settlement of...
The Maritime Mode of Production: The Role of Seafaring in Bronze Age Societies (2018)
As exemplified by Viking and Bronze Age societies in northern Europe, we model the political dynamics of raiding, trading, and slaving as a maritime mode of production (MMP). It includes political strategies to control trade by owning boats and financing excursions, thus permitting chiefs to channel wealth flows and establish decentralized, expansive political networks. Such political institutions often form at edges of world systems, where chieftains support mobile warriors, who were...
Measuring performance under sail (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...
Medical Cannibalism in Scandinavian Folklore: Practical Uses and Religious Rationalities (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. Although cannibalism is a contested theme in anthropology, there is one area and era that has received little attention: Scandinavian folklore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The widely documented practices...
MID-LATE HOLOCENE POPULATION TRENDS AND MARITIME RESOURCE INTENSIFICATION IN WESTERN ALASKA (2017)
Population growth has long been argued to play a critical role in promoting cultural evolution, operating both through adaptation to population pressure and increasing social network size and transmission frequency. We present a model of mid-late Holocene Alaskan population size based on a temporal frequency analysis of 902 site occupation episodes dating between 6000 and 1000 radiocarbon years BP, with two objectives: (1) identify factors that influenced Alaskan population dynamics over this...
Molecular Markers in Keratins from Hair and Baleen for Species Identification of Archaeological Artefacts (2017)
In this paper, we present a methodology to identify organic remains from Arctic and sub-Arctic origin. Peptide mass fingerprinting (based on the characterization of specific peptides from proteins) is a rapid and efficient method for species identification, which requires little material and provide results on processed and degraded material. Recent studies of ancient marine mammals’ remains has used collagen peptides in bones and skins for species identification. Here we demonstrate the...
The Mosfell Excavations: Viking Archaeology in Iceland (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. Presents recent findings of the Mosfell Archaeological Project (MAP) in Iceland’s Mosfell Valley (Mosfellsdalur). Reviews excavations at Leiruvogur Bay at the coastal mouth of the valley and at Hrísbrú, the farmstead of the Mosfell chieftains. These two Viking Age sites formed a 10th century...
"Most beautiful favorite reindeer" – Life histories of reindeer offered at Sámi offering sites in northern Fennoscandia (2017)
Animal offerings made at various sacred sites were an integral part of the ethnic religion of the indigenous Sámi people of northern parts of present-day Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia from ca. 800 AD onwards. The offering tradition was interwoven with subsistence patterns and human-animal relationships, as in the Sámi worldview, offerings were a means to communicate with gods and guardian spirits of animals to negotiate things such as success in hunting or reindeer husbandry. In this...
Najwczesniejsze statki wschodnioatlantyckie i zachodniosródziemnomorskie: ze studiów nad rekonstrukcja. [The earliest east-Atlantic and West-Mediterranean ships: studies in reconstruction] (1971)
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...
The North Atlantic Wool Trade, ca. 1000–1400: A Strontium Isotope Approach (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. North Atlantic islands were colonized by settlers from Norway and the British Isles in the ninth century, bringing agricultural practices from Northern Europe. Wool and fish dominated exports from Iceland from the Viking Age, although the impact of the wool trade remains...
North of the Wall: Archaeo-ecological Approaches to Scotland’s elusive Paleolithic Past (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For more than a century, Paleolithic Scotland was missing from the textbooks, presumed nonexistent. A low-density of archaeological finds was compounded by a research tradition that persistently excluded the possibility of human settlement at the extreme edge of north-west Europe prior to the Holocene, a situation at odds...
Oceanic Tendencies: Ritual Landscapes, Oyster Shells, and the Social Worlds of Marine Resource Exploitation in Early Medieval Britain (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. Oyster shells have been discovered across multiple sites in Britain, often as part of shell middens which have been interrupted almost exclusively as food refuse. But whether inland or by the sea, people in Britain had used oysters and other molluscs to help make their religion. Oyster shells...
On the Margins of the Marginal? Fringe Settlement and Land Use in Norse Greenland (2017)
Just before AD 1000 pioneer Norse hunter-farmers settled in Greenland and established what would be the extreme western outpost of Scandinavia and Europe for the next 450 years. The unexplained disappearance of this marginal medieval colony around AD 1450 has always puzzled researchers and has been proposed as a prime example of maladaptation to climatic and environmental deterioration at the onset of the ˈLittle Ice Ageˈ (LIA). As part of the Island Ecodynamics in the North Atlantic Project...
Opening Up a Can of Worms: Putting Archaeological Evidence for Intestinal Parasites in Conversation with Early Medieval Medical Manuscripts (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. In what ways did early medieval people of the Atlantic Archipelago encounter parasitic worms within and about their bodies, and how did these gutsy matters affect their daily lived experiences? To begin answering these questions, we should consider, alongside environmental archaeological data, textual sources in the...
Passing the Paleo Drug Test: Testing for Medicinal Plant Use in the Paleoethnobotanical Record (2018)
For decades, paleoethnobotanical research almost exclusively concentrated on reconstructing past subsistence economies. At 2011’s SAA conference, I presented a paper entitled, Toward A Paleoethnomedicine. I suggested that paleoethnobotanical research should take inspiration from ethnomedicine (a subfield of ethnobotany) and concentrate on analyzing past people’s healing practices and performances. This paper presents a method to operationalize this concept, a technique for analyzing...
The Past and Present Social Role of Viking Age Mounds (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jellhaug, Norway, is Scandinavia’s second largest prehistoric mound. Dating from the (pre)Viking period, it has a long history of human interaction and interpretation. Built in phases with distinct, selected, and transformed earthly materials, the mound compares with contemporary mounds in that both the...
People, Place, and Identity: Funerary Landscapes and the Development of the Early Medieval Kingdom of Northumbria (2018)
Early medieval Britain witnessed dramatic changes to the socio-cultural landscape due to the withdrawal of Roman authority, climatic change, and the arrival of migrants from the continent and from different regions of Britain. The analytical and scientific analysis of the burial record, from a landscape perspective, allows an investigation of key questions related to the scope and nature of this migration, the development of social identity, and how portions of Britain expanded from small...
Playing at Death: A Discussion of Hnefatafl Pieces in Viking Burials (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Small Things Unforgotten" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Board games, from a psychological standpoint, have been seen as a reflection of skill, cunning, wisdom, and intelligence. Since most board games were developed in order to hone one’s skills in a certain area of life, the presence of them in graves should indicate a level of intellectual prowess. However, from an archaeological viewpoint, the presence of board...