North America: Arctic and Subarctic (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (168 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations in 2012 and 2016 at Iita, located along the North Water Polynya in NW Greenland, revealed unmixed stratified deposits extending from Late Dorset habitation over 1000 years ago through Thule-Inughuit occupation and Inughuit contact with Arctic explorers ca. 1850–1917. Iita is unique in that a large dovekie colony breeds in this area annually, thus...
A 2000-Year-Old Family: Interpreting Site Structure and Human Behaviors at the Swan Point Site, Interior Alaska (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper seeks to interpret the spatial patterning of the Swan Point Locus 2 site, interpreted to be a seasonal residential site. The site, located on a hill overlooking a small northern tributary of the Tanana River, consists of several features in excellent preservation. The assemblage suggests a pattern of features and artifacts consistent with a...
2017 Excavations at McDonald Creek (FAI-2043), A Multicomponent, Open-Air Site in the Tanana Flats Training Area, Fort Wainwright, Central Alaska (2018)
In 2013 our team began a 3-year testing project to assess the research potential of the recently-discovered McDonald Creek archaeological site (FAI-2043). The site is located in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska south of Fairbanks. Site testing indicated a well-stratified and reasonably preserved multicomponent site situated in unconsolidated eolian sand and silt deposits atop an ancient alluvial landform. Three cultural components have been identified so far, dating to the early Allerød,...
Access to Information: The Case of Birch Island (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent archaeological project on Birch Island, Labrador, highlights questions of how digital data are used to gather and convey information to stakeholder communities, in particular, Indigenous groups with limited internet access in some remote locations. This paper questions if representing the...
Accountability in Arctic Archaeology: A Continuing Conversation for Change (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within Arctic archaeology, we are encouraged by community-led and partnership projects to continuously rethink our research practices. These projects have demonstrated that change is possible, it can be done successfully, and it leads to rich holistic narratives of past lifeways. However, more attention needs to be given to how current practices...
Adding to the Paleoenvironmental Framework for Early Settlement of Interior Alaska: New Perspectives on Local Changes in Vegetation and Hydrology from Plant Wax N-Alkanes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Alaska, the Gateway to the Americas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many paleoenvironmental reconstructions from interior Alaska are based on pollen assemblages from lacustrine cores, which are sometimes challenging to relate directly to terrestrial conditions experienced by early human occupants. Here we use compound-specific stable isotope analysis of plant wax n-alkanes (δ13C wax and δDwax values) to...
Alaskan Legacy Collections Outside Alaska: Challenges, Opportunities and Potential (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. Alaskan "legacy collections" are housed at many American institutions outside of Alaska. These collections contain great potential for object-focused analysis, looking toward specific object classes, or even individual objects for in-depth review. This poster will present a summary of the locations of...
Alutiiq Use of Birds during the Ocean Bay Period at Rice Ridge (49-KOD-363), Kodiak Island (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rice Ridge (49-KOD-363) is a deeply stratified archaeological site on Kodiak Island, with well-preserved faunal remains dated to the Ocean Bay tradition (7600–4200 cal BP; Kopperl 2003, 2012). The site contained an extensive bird bone assemblage that has not been analyzed before now. Casperson (2012) studied bird bones from Mink Island (49-XMK-030), located...
Anatomy of an Arctic Archaeobotanical Analysis: Insights about Ancestral Inuvialuit Plant Use at Agvik, Banks Island, NWT (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite extensive Inuit knowledge of and interest in plants, archaeobotanical studies are incredibly rare in the Arctic, representing a clear bias of archaeologists. The proliferation of community-engaged research in the north is helping to open an avenue to more archaeobotanical work. While fish and mammals certainly composed the bulk of the Inuit...
Ancient Alaskan Firewood Management Strategies and the Role of Selectivity: Preliminary Results (2018)
When historic Alaskans chose a settlement site, access to adequate fuel was as important as the availability of food and water. Despite its importance fuel use in the Arctic and Subarctic has received relatively little attention. Work currently underway aims to clarify the criteria used to select fuel in ancient Alaska by testing two hypotheses. The Efficiency Maximization hypothesis, derived from the prey choice model of human behavioral ecology, proposes that Alaskans ranked woody taxa...
Anna and the Sea: Reflections on Anna Kerttula's Influence on a Generation of North Pacific Archaeology (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. Archaeological research in Alaska and the broader North Pacific Rim has revealed a long and complex history of human occupation, dynamic human-environmental interactions, and – above all - underscores the relevance of archaeology to people living across the region today. These developments span the nearly two decades of Dr....
Archaeological Recovery of Late Pleistocene Hair and Environmental DNA from Interior Alaska (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Alaska, the Gateway to the Americas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient hair and remnant plant DNA are important environmental proxies that preserve for millennia in specific archaeological contexts. However, recovery has been rare from late Pleistocene sites and more may be found if deliberately sought. Once discovered, singular hair fragments are not easily identified to taxa through comparative...
Archaeology and NAGPRA in Alaska: Examples of Intentional Excavation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Collections: Federal Archaeology and "New Discoveries" under NAGPRA" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intentional excavation of human remains and associated items subject to NAGPRA occurs rarely. Such excavations are only permitted under particular circumstances and only with approval of lineal descendants (as appropriate) and affiliated tribes. In Alaska, National Park Service staff have facilitated...
Archaeology in the Bering Sea: Results from 25 Years of Periodic Archaeological Research on St. Matthew and Hall Islands, the Most Remote Area within Alaska (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. St. Matthew and Hall Islands are located in the Bering Sea, far from the Alaskan mainland. Located within the Bering Sea Wildlife Refuge, these uninhabited islands are visited by refuge biologists about once every five years for an approximate 8–10-day period, in order to conduct studies of island fowl and fauna. Since 1997, the Refuge has sponsored an...
Arctic Heterotopias: Qariyit as Queer Spaces In Precontact Inuit Communities (2018)
Gender and landscape have each proved to be such powerful archaeological tropes that thinking them together seems sure to yield interesting results. In the precontact Inuit world, gender and related dimensions of embodiment were key axes of spatial practice and place-based identification. Women’s and men’s activities were differently distributed across the landscape – in general, women occupying and managing domestic and near-community spaces, and men employing watercraft and dogs to operate...
Arctic Horizons: Forging Priorities for Arctic Social Sciences and NSF Funding (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. Arctic Horizons – a multi-institution collaboration funded through NSF's Arctic Social Science program – brought together the Arctic social science research community to reassess goals, potentials, and needs affecting the diverse disciplinary and transdisciplinary currents of social science research in the circumpolar North...
#Arctic: Social Media and the Communication of Arctic Archaeological Knowledge (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Public outreach is an essential part of Arctic archaeology, and the range of platforms available for the dissemination of data has developed significantly over the last decade. To ensure ethical accountability to Indigenous communities, policy makers, and funding bodies, the relevance of archaeological research must be shared with the wider public....
Assessing Impacts of European Contact on Beothuk Projectile Point Technology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The lithic technology of the Beothuk has seldom been the focus of diachronic or regional comparative studies. Recently excavated Beothuk materials from Stock Cove, a site located in southeastern Newfoundland that has significant time depth, provide an excellent dataset to assess change through time and regional technological variation. The research presented...
Assessing Variability in Toolkit Functionality: Differential Wear Patterns on Projectile Technologies from Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene Interior Alaska (2018)
Much of the early theoretical framework for our understanding of the colonization and occupation of interior Alaska has been established on technological variability in lithic assemblages of the region. This initial research has been limited in scope, focusing on the presence or absence of microblades. Recent research has sought to push beyond the significance of debatably diagnostic tool forms, microblades, in defining cultural complexes and has attempted to more fully address models of...
Assessment of the Archaeological Record for the Tanana Valley, Alaska, and a New Cultural Synthesis (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Alaska, the Gateway to the Americas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological record in the Tanana Valley region has accrued for almost a century and investigators have applied a variety of different naming schemes for these complex archaeological records. There is a need to synthesize nomenclature for these cultural phenomena. In general, archaeologists have fitted identified components into...
Avvajja (Abverdjar) Revisited: Reconstructing Tuniit (Dorset Paleo-Inuit) and Recent-Historic Inuit Life at an Iconic Site in Northern Foxe Basin, Nunavut, Canada (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations in the early to mid-twentieth century at the multicomponent site Avvajja (Abverdjar) (NiHg-1), northern Foxe Basin, Nunavut, produced arguably some of the most iconic Tuniit (Late Dorset Paleo-Inuit) artifacts yet found in Inuit Nunangat (the traditional Inuit territories of Arctic Canada). Avvajja is also notable for being the site of the...
Beach Level Chronology and Paleodemography at Alarniq, Northern Foxe Basin, Arctic Canada (2018)
In this paper we discuss beach level chronology and settlement at Alarniq—the ‘type-site’ for Dorset culture history and one of the largest Dorset archaeological sites in the Eastern Arctic. The Dorset occupation at the site extends approximately 3 km along a succession of raised gravel beach ridges, ranging in elevation between 8 to 24 m asl, and is almost entirely comprised of semi-subterranean structures that would have been occupied during the cold season. The number of houses varies across...
Beringian Landscapes and Human Responses in the Middle Tanana Valley, Alaska (2018)
The middle Tanana Valley of interior Alaska, an unglaciated region of Eastern Beringia, holds a high-resolution record of human-environment interaction that extends over 14,000 years. The Late Glacial and early Holocene landscapes of this region were dynamic with considerable ecological restructuring. Aeolian deposits accumulated in lowland areas and adjacent foothills at relatively high rates, soils were relatively underdeveloped, river down-cutting prevailed across the valley, and wild fires...
Beyond Binaries: Queering the Archaeological Record of the Western Canadian Arctic (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Queer theory is often equated with sexuality research in archaeology (Blackmore 2011), but a queering of the archaeological record actually allows us to challenge all aspects of (hetero)normativity in archaeological practice (Croucher 2005; Blackmore 2011). Queer is "whatever is at odds with the normal, legitimate and the dominant" (Halperin 1995:62), and it...
Birnirk and Thule Pottery: Analysis of Arctic Ceramics from Inuigniq (Cape Espenberg), Alaska (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We are conducting a multi-year (2009-2018), multi-disciplinary research project at Inuigniq (Cape Espenberg) to explore changing patterns of human occupation, culture change, and environmental conditions in Northwest Alaska. Our current focus is on the emergence of Birnirk archaeological culture ca. AD 1000, and the question of how Birnirk culture factored...