North America: Arctic and Subarctic (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (168 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transformation of the Birnirk culture into the Thule culture remains central to the development of modern Inuit peoples across the Arctic. Nevertheless, its chronological definition remains imprecise and contentious despite a century of research since the discovery of the Birnirk site near Utqiagvik and the definition of the Thule culture in the...
The Birnirk/Thule Migrations: Pushed from an Overpopulated Bering Strait Dominated by Old Bering Sea Culture (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A climate-driven eastward push of Thule migrants remains axiomatic to many arctic archaeologists, associated with presumed warming weather of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), by tradition dated ca. AD 1000. Thule researchers implicated a rapid migration by rapacious “over-killing” seal-hunters and whalers entering unoccupied landscapes—increasingly...
Bluefish Caves Revisited: Testing a Potential Pre-Clovis Site in Eastern Beringia (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. Originally excavated by Jacques Cinq-Mars in the 1970s and 1980s, Bluefish Caves, Yukon Territory, yielded artifacts and faunal remains. Cinq-Mars’s chronology for human occupation at the site dates to as early as ca. 24 ka and has been corroborated by AMS 14C-dated cut-marked bones. These findings support the genetic “Beringian...
Bone Artifacts from Summer Bay, Unalaska (2018)
Situated in Alaska’s eastern Aleutian Islands on Unalaska Island, the Summer Bay site dates to 2,000 years BP. Over 700 osseous objects representing various manufacture and use stages have been recovered. Among these are harpoons, fish hooks, labrets, points, wedges, awls, and needles. These are primarily made from sea mammals and avifauna. Although Summer Bay represents one of the most secure dates of the Amaknak Phase (3,000 to 1,000 years BP), minimal research has been done to better...
Building a Database to Understand the Architecture of Arctic Wooden House Remains (2018)
Western Arctic archaeological sites hold the remains of wooden houses occupied during the second millennium AD by ancestors of the present Inuit people. Although the permafrost helps to maintain these features in excellent condition, the giant puzzle resulting from the collapse of the frame makes it hard to understand their original architecture. During the ArcticCHAR project, we excavated a house at Kuukpak (Northwest Territories, Canada) in 2014 and 2016. Facing the complexity of this feature,...
The Carpenter Quarry Site: A Unique Salvage Excavation Strategy (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 Carpenter Quarry site is an early multicomponent site discovered in the interior of Alaska in 2021. The site overlooks the Tanana River and Shaw Creek Flats, an area rich in significant sites, including Broken Mammoth, Mead, Holzman, and Swan Point. The site, located on top of a bluff with the Middle Tanana Dene place name...
Centering Alluitsoq: The Potential for an Indigenous Archaeology in Greenland (2018)
Postcolonial and Indigenous archaeologies have changed the theoretical, methodological, and political landscapes of our discipline’s engagement with regions and peoples once conceptualized as peripheral to the European core. However, some regions, and the subjects that move within them, still occupy the conceptual margins. This paper considers the position of archaeological praxes in Greenland, a constituent of the Kingdom of Denmark, and the late arrival of the postcolonial critique to...
Clarifying Perceptions of Rock: Prehistoric Use of Common Toolstone in Tangle Lakes, Alaska (2018)
Archaeologists have had difficulty agreeing upon uniform designations of certain kinds of toolstone that are not easily distinguishable visually. There are occasions when the archaeological definition of toolstone material and the geological definition of the same toolstone material do not match. A situation where this discrepancy might arise is when archaeologists give a more specific name to a cryptocrystalline silicate that is difficult to identify based on visual analysis. An understanding...
Cleaning up History: Historic preservation at Formally Used Defense Sites (2019)
This is an abstract from the "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: A National Perspective on CRM, Research, and Consultation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Alaska District's Formally Used Defense Site (FUDS) program conducts environmental remediation of abandoned World War II and Cold War era military facilities owned by federal, state, and local parties. These FUDS properties, which are often in remote...
Clearing the Fog: Contributions to Central Aleutian Island 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 survey and excavation on Adak Island, Aleutian archipelago, Alaska were funded by NSF through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The chance NSF and Anna Kerttula took on a small project in a remote location with a small crew had an unexpected and significant effect on the understanding of...
Climate Change and the Rapid Loss of Organic Deposits in West Greenland (2018)
The REMAINS (REsearch and Management of Archaeological sites IN a changing environment and Society) of Greenland project has explored a number of factors that currently threaten Greenland’s archaeological landscape in the coming decades. This paper reviews recent work as well as the problems and threats to coastal and inland middens along the country’s West coast and adjacent inner fjord systems. Information gathered in recent years provides a baseline for "ground-truthing" predictive models of...
Colonial Households and Homes: Changes in Kalaallit Architecture, 1750–1900 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the initial colonization of Kalaallit Nunaat, houses and housing have been a contested subject. The Danish Trade wanted Kalaallit Inuit to live traditionally as before missionization, spread out and following the animals, thus increasing the economic return. However, the Mission wanted Kalaallit Inuit close to the colonies because it would ease...
Community, Co-design, and Climate: Case Studies in Designing Public Outreach for Arctic Archaeology (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. Archaeological visualization—the task of picturing the past in the present—exists at the intersections of data collection, interpretation, local perspectives, and artfully crafted storytelling. This type of science communication and public engagement work forms a core dimension of archaeology today, particularly for projects...
Comparing Archaeology and Oral Tradition at the Tlákw.aan (Old Town) Site, Yakutat Bay, Alaska (2018)
Southeast Alaskan oral narratives describe the epic migration of an Ahtna Raven clan from its interior Copper River territory over montane glaciers to the Pacific coast at Yakutat Bay, where the group founded the village of Tlákw.aan (Old Town) and intermarried with Eyak and Tlingit lineages. The multi-cultural origins of the residents are reflected in architecture and artifacts excavated at the site by Frederica de Laguna in the 1950s and during collaborative Smithsonian investigations in 2014....
Comparing Lithic Procurement and Use Within the Foxe Basin, Nunavut (2018)
This paper presents a systematic review and update on the nature of stone tool use in the Foxe Basin region throughout the Paleo-Inuit period (2,500 BCE-1,600CE). The Foxe Basin was previously thought to have been a core area of ecological stability/predictability that supported an uninterrupted occupation throughout the Paleo-Inuit timespan. Given the untenability of the core area model and that populations fluctuated over time and space, a reevaluation of lithic technologies and their change...
The Complexity of Archaeological Site Revisits: A Case Study from Labrador (2018)
The five sites recorded in Junius Bird’s 1934 survey of the Hopedale area are both culturally important to the local Inuit community and to the history of the creation of archaeological narratives about the Labrador Inuit. Recently, the Hopedale and Nunatsiavut governments have stated a desire for additional archaeological research prompting Memorial University to revisit the Avertok and Karmakulluk sites to conduct additional excavations. In the 83 years that have passed since Bird’s work, many...
Connecting Language, Places, Stories, and Archaeology for Landscape-level Heritage Preservation: A Collaborative Archaeology Case Study of Eyak Lake, Alaska (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community-Based Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores a methodological process for documenting the intricate relationships between language, place names, stories, and cultural places for effective landscape heritage preservation. This multi-disciplinary program, led by the Eyak community, is focused on the analysis of place-based data and cultural knowledge systems, as the...
The Connections within Togiak: An Attempt to Further Understand Colonial Impacts on a Multigenerational Village (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Temyiq Tuyuryaq: Collaborative Archaeology the Yup’iit Way" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The purpose of this project is to explore the collaborative arch within the project's spider work framework. Everything in life is interwoven: where one is born has lasting effects on cultural norms, education, healthcare, socio-economic status, social-status, support networks, as well as physical environment. Creating a united...
Contributions of IRSL to the Issue of Initial Settlement in the New World: The Case of the McDonald Creek Archaeological Site (2021)
This is an abstract from the "McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The McDonald Creek archaeological site from central Alaska (USA) has been dated using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) in order to document the initial settlement in the New World. Eolian sediment samples (loess) from stratigraphic profiles have been systematically dated...
Croxton Site Faunal Assemblage: Pre- and Post-Deposition Disturbance Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The pre- and post-depositional processes that impacted the faunal assemblage associated with the Ipiutak component at the Croxton site, Alaska, have not been adequately studied/documented (see Gerlach 1989). This study focuses not only on the pre- and post-depositional disturbances that may have occurred, but also on how the burial environment may have played...
Cultural and Ecological Relationships between the Unangax̂ and Seabirds on Sanak Island, AK (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Seabirds were, and continue to be, an important resource for the Unangax̂ living in the Aleutian Archipelago, AK. In addition to food, birds were used as raw material for everyday and ceremonial clothing, tools, and objects. They also play an important role in Unangan ontologies, appearing in transformative processes. Sanak Island, the easternmost island...
Cultural Identity, Subsistence, and the Potential for Epigenetic Research in Togiak, Alaska (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Temyiq Tuyuryaq: Collaborative Archaeology the Yup’iit Way" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contemporary village of Togiak, and the old village site, Temyiq Tuyuryaq (Old Togiak), together represent a multigenerational Yup’ik village in northern Bristol Bay, Alaska (K. Barnett 2018). Cultural identity has been, and continues to be, heavily influenced by subsistence. Throughout the past 1300 years the region has...
Cultural Resources Investigations of Yusdishlaq’, a Historic Dena’ina Village on Alaska’s Lower Susitna River (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation discusses the history and identification of Yusdishlaq’, a nineteenth-century Dena’ina village on the lower Susitna River in southcentral Alaska, USA. According to ethnographic and historical accounts, Yusdishlaq’ was situated on an island near Susitna Station, a settlement on the historic Iditarod Trail. Yusdishlaq’ was reportedly the...
Culture, Community, and Collaboration: Lessons from the Nome Archaeology Camp (2019)
This is an abstract from the "NPS Archeology: Engaging the Public through Education and Recreation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2015, the Nome Archaeology Camp has hosted over 40 Alaskan high school students in four, week-long explorations of Northwest Alaska's rich cultural heritage. A partnership between federal agencies, regional tribal consortiums, non-profit organizations, and local experts, the annual summer camp engages students in...
Data Sovereignty for Indigenous Communities in the Arctic: Ensuring Ethical Control of Information and Knowledge for Indigenous Partners through Digital Tools (2018)
The Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA, eloka-arctic.org) partners with Indigenous communities in the Arctic to create online products that facilitate the collection, preservation, exchange, and use of local observations and Indigenous Knowledge of the Arctic. ELOKA has created numerous digital products guided by Indigenous partners, ranging from atlases preserving and visualizing Indigenous Knowledge and information, to online databases allowing for Arctic...