North America: Arctic and Subarctic (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Ebel. Christyann Darwent. Genevieve LeMoine. John Darwent.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerad Smith.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Graf. Julie Esdale. Ted Goebel.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Gutoski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I have been searching for the photographs and tracings made by J. Louis Giddings in June 1940 as reported in the American Antiquity, Vol. 7, No. 1 (July 1941) since I was an undergraduate student in anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in 1992. When entering the program for my master’s degree in the 2000’s I had to content myself that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Brenan.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danii Desmarais. Lesley Howse. Mari Kleist. Letitia Pokiak.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Kielhofer. Jessica Tierney. Joshua Reuther. Ben Potter. Charles Holmes.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annalisa Hppner.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madonna Moss. Amy Shannon.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natasha Lyons. Lisa Hodgetts. David Haogak. Mervin Joe.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Crawford.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Fitzhugh. Catherine West. Sven Haakanson.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Wygal. Kathryn Krasinski. Charles Holmes. Barbara Crass. Jessica Metcalfe.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Hutchings. Deirdre Elliott.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research and Challenges in Arctic and Subarctic Cultural Heritage Studies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in Nunatsiavut has benefitted from past large-scale survey, testing, and excavation efforts that have served as the foundational bodies of work and knowledge upon which subsequent projects have been built. These wide-ranging projects opened up innumerable new avenues of inquiry and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ching Yi Chan. Norman Easton. Robert Sattler.

This is an abstract from the "Posters on the Archaeology of the Southern Yukon-Alaska Borderlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will map out selected archaeological sites of the SY-AB and provide a table of associated radiocarbon dates calibrated to the most recent IntCal 20. Human occupation of what was then extreme southeastern Beringia begins in the Allerød interstadial (ca. 14.2 to 12.9 Kya) demonstrated at Little John and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rhea Hood. Rachel Mason.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Griffin.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Holly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Forgetting, an attendant to culture change, is the stuff of history. When cultural innovations, exchange, and adoption occur, previous customs, knowledge, technology, and other dimensions of culture are lost—they are forgotten. This paper considers the phenomenon of forgetting and its permutations—the passive forgetting that is more or less an accepted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John White. Jeffrey Rasic. Mike Loso.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of the Southern Yukon-Alaska Borderlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The multicomponent hunter-gatherer site Nataeł Na’ represents the first evidence of Pleistocene-aged human occupation in the Copper River basin. One occupation dates to the Allerød interstadial and another to the late Younger Dryas climate reversal. To date, the Allerød occupation has been identified only by a small assemblage of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darren Heigel. Amanda Schmidt. Lucille Katzman-Tranah. Hollis K. Miller. Ben Fitzhugh.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This past summer, we traveled to Kodiak, Alaska to conduct archaeological fieldwork as part of the Old Harbor Archaeological History Project (OHAHP). This year, OHAHP partnered with Old Harbor community organizations to co-facilitate a cultural camp for local Indigenous youth. Serving as counselors, we aimed to expose Indigenous youth to archaeology by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Sattler. Christian Thomas. Angela Younie. Thomas Gillispie. Jeffry Rasic.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of the Southern Yukon-Alaska Borderlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Upper Yukon River Canyon traverses the international border between Alaska and the Yukon Territory. We consolidate over 60 radiocarbon dates among numerous sites and develop a first-approximation model spanning the Chindadn to Dene Traditions in Eastern Beringia. The radiocarbon date series is ordered temporally in ten...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Whitridge.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby Anderson. Colleen Strawhacker. Aaron Presnall. Arctic Horizons Steering Committee.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matilda Siebrecht.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Samuels. Christopher Wolff.

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...