North America: Arctic and Subarctic (Geographic Keyword)
76-100 (168 Records)
Dogs are arguably the most significant domestic species in the circumpolar North, in both their universal importance to life-ways and their near-uniqueness as a regional domesticate. The Arctic was the gateway for at least 4 independent waves of migration of dogs into the Americas, beginning as early as ~17,500-13,000 years ago, making this region particularly important for investigating not only the cultural and technological functions of Arctic dogs, but also the impact of successive...
From Omajuk to NiKik: The Variable Transformation of Animals into Social Things among the Historic Period Labrador Inuit (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. Archaeological studies have conventionally regarded Inuit relationships to animals in terms of subsistence and food-getting, from seasonality and hunting strategies to calories of meat, fat, and marrow consumed. Inuit oral traditions and ethnographic sources, however, offer...
From Source to Site: Investigating Diachronic Toolstone Procurement and Land-Use in the Nenana Valley, 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. The archaeological record of Eastern Beringia is critical to understanding human dispersal into the Americas and the settling-in processes of the First Americans and their descendants. Investigating prehistoric landscape use and provisioning behaviors is significant in answering questions related to adaptive behaviors of prehistoric Beringians. We can begin...
Gardens in the Aleutian Islands: Landscape Management by Unangan/Unangas Ancestors (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehistoric large village midden sites in the Aleutian Islands provide soil chemistry and drainage environments optimal for the growth of plants that feature prominently in Unangan/Unangas traditional subsistence. Previous interpretations view this as fortuitous and non-deliberate. We argue that evidence suggests instead that plants useful in subsistence and...
Genetic and ZooMS Identification of Marine Mammal Bone from Norse Sites in Iceland and Greenland: Insights into Historic Ecology and Norse Economies (2018)
Evidence from Arctic and North Atlantic archaeological sites shows marine mammals were frequently used by Norse settlers in Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Archaeofaunal assemblages often yield a wealth of complete bones, however, species-level identification is not possible for heavily fragmented specimens. Therefore, specific details about marine mammal utilization are often unquantified and marine species identification largely remains unverified. This paper reveals utility of ZooMS...
Geochemical Characterization and Raw Material Procurement at McDonald Creek, Alaska (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. Around 14,000 years ago, modern humans dispersed into eastern Beringia. McDonald Creek, located in the Tanana Valley, central Alaska, is a significant part of characterizing this dispersal as one of the earliest known sites in eastern Beringia. This site posesses three cultural...
Governing Powers: Conceptualizing Research Sovereignty in Archaeology (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. Throughout the past decade there have been significant dialogue and debate surrounding Indigenous Archaeology and the perceived challenges of designing and carrying out research. Indigenous approaches demand an individualized place-based approach, eluding the ability to establish a specific methodology. This can result in...
Hearth and Home at Sabbath Point: A Beothuk Housepit on Red Indian Lake, Newfoundland (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We report on recent excavations at an unusual Beothuk housepit feature located on Red Indian Lake, in the interior of the island of Newfoundland, Canada. The housepit is remarkable for its large size and hexagonal shape, for having escaped destruction from logging, flooding, and earlier avocational investigations, and for the fact that it does...
Hearth Features in High-Latitude Environments (2018)
The depositional context of many high-latitude archaeological sites often inhibits preservation of hearth features and associated organic remains. When preserved, subsurface hearth features provide insight into the role of plant resources in prehistoric hunter-gatherer economies. This research addresses questions of taphonomy, paleoecology, and prehistoric plant use with archaeobotanical analysis of hearth features from sites located in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve and Gates of the...
The Hess Creek Site and Implications for Livengood and Yukon River Archaeology (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 Hess Creek Site (LIV-00001) is a multicomponent site 36 km southeast of the Yukon River within the Yukon-Tanana uplands. It was initially located in 1969, tested and partially excavated in 1970, and revisited in 1975, 2016, 2020, and 2021. Extensive excavation in 2021 shows a potential separation between two cultural zones, Cultural...
Holocene Occupations of the Blair Lakes Archaeological District (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 Tanana Basin of interior Alaska is at the center of efforts to identify late Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sites that better define regional occupation histories and provide insight into subarctic adaptation, technological organization, assemblage variability,...
Household Archaeology of Shaw Creek, Alaska (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study compares the remains of two prehistoric houses to those of the protohistoric past. Each housepit represents a different archaeological tradition, dating roughly to 1,000 and 2,000 years ago. If house features represent a stable material culture correlate reflecting a culture's core concept of the family unit, the comparison allows us a viewpoint of...
Human Behavioral Ecology and the Complexities of Arctic Foodways (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we will examine whether Arctic and Subarctic coasts have unique characteristics in the context of human behavioral ecology (HBE). We start with a review of the variability in maritime adaptations around the circumpolar north, and then examine efforts to apply HBE models...
Human Land Use Strategies and Responses to Risk during the Pleistocene–Holocene Transition in Eastern Beringia (2018)
Recent investigations in central Alaska at multiple scales (macro-regional, watershed, site cluster, intrasite) have revealed robust patterning among technological, faunal, and feature datasets. These responses are explored in the context of both regional environmental change associated with climatic oscillations between the Bolling-Allerod, Younger Dryas, and early Holocene chronozones as well as systemic change incorporating more logistical organization, shifts in diet breadth, and changes in...
Identification and Classification of the Environmental Microbiome of the Temyiq Tuyuryaq (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. This pilot study aims to culture and monitor bacterial species from a specific range of archaeological samples from Temyiq Tuyuryaq, a multigenerational village in northern Bristol Bay, Alaska. Goals of this study are to test our ability to identify variability and consistency of the microbial species present in conditions of...
Identifying Consumption of Putrefied Meat in the Archaeological Record from δ15N Values (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Speth (2017) proposed that the consumption of putrid meat and fish might be a dietary item that is underexplored in the Upper Paleolithic food menu. In this presentation we explore ways to identify the consumption of putrid foods. We compare the results from our study of Δ15N observed in mammal muscle tissue decomposing during winter with published stable...
Implementing NAGPRA: A Look at BLM’s Experiences in Alaska, 1990–2017 (2018)
The 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) resulted in new responsibilities and challenges for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). These included working with museums and tribes concerning certain items in museums removed from federal land sometimes more than a century earlier. The BLM in Alaska has been actively involved with NAGPRA work since the early 1990s, and has completed numerous Federal Register Notices and repatriations with more in...
The Inglefield Land Archaeology Project in NW Greenland, 2004-16: Mitigating Cultural Resources in the Era of Climate Change (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. With support of the NSF Arctic Social Sciences program, we undertook seven field seasons (2004-2016) investigating the 4000-year history of human habitation of Inglefield Land, with particular attention to the Inughuit and their interactions with Euro-American Arctic explorers in the...
Innovation, Intensification, and "Maritimeness" 4,500 Years Ago at Chignik, Alaska (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the south side of the central Alaska Peninsula, close to culture-history's boundary between "Eskimo" and "Aleut," lies Chignik. Most archaeological investigations and explanations in the broader region have emphasized the overwhelming importance of resources derived from the sea. But at Chignik, evidence of a divergent facet of maritime adaptation has been...
Interdisciplinary Studies at Delta River Overlook Site, a Late Pleistocene to Late Holocene Multicomponent Site in Central Alaska (2018)
Recent large-scale excavations at Delta River Overlook in the middle Tanana River basin yielded 12 components dating from the onset of the Younger Dryas (~12,860 cal BP) to the later Holocene (2300 cal yr BP). Well preserved faunal assemblages, including bison, are present in multiple components, with economic transitions evident at ~6000 cal yr BP. Several features and activity areas were analyzed, including ochre-rich processing areas. Over 20,000 lithic items have been analyzed, primarily...
Interpreting Technological Activities and Organization at McDonald Creek, Central Alaska, ca. 13,900 Calendar Years Ago (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. Continuing excavations at the McDonald Creek site, located in the Tanana Flats south of the city of Fairbanks, have yielded a significant assemblage of stone artifacts. Most of these come from a late Pleistocene cultural layer dating to about 13,900 calendar years ago, but...
Inuit Sled Dogs in the Contact Landscape: An Isotopic Investigation of Dog Provisioning in 16th–19th Century Labrador, Canada (2018)
The 16th through 19th centuries witnessed increasing cross-cultural interactions between the Inuit of the Labrador coast and European explorers, traders, and missionaries. The effects of colonialism in this period have been studied with respect to Inuit identity, material culture, gender, and social organization, but the nature of Inuit-animal relationships has received comparatively less attention. In addition to occupying a prominent social role, the sled dog facilitated Inuit mobility and...
Investigating Organic Residues on Prehistoric Cooking Technologies in the Aleutian Islands (2018)
Stone bowls and griddle stones were in use in the Aleutian Islands for the past 9.000 years. People invested great time and effort into the manufacture and maintenance of these artefacts which insinuates their importance in prehistoric Aleutian food processing practices. A sudden increase in stone bowl occurrence around 3.500 years ago emphasizes their importance during this particular time. What was it that made these artefacts so important? We believe the answer to this question lies in their...
Investigations of the Late Pleistocene occupations at Holzman, Shaw Creek, Interior Alaska (2018)
The Holzman site, discovered in 2015, is roughly one half mile from the confluence of Shaw Creek with the Tanana River in interior Alaska. To date, we have excavated 56m2, revealing repeated occupations beginning in the Bolling-Allerod, and including an occupation in the Younger Dryas. Located near the Broken Mammoth, Mead, and Swan Point late Pleistocene sites, Holzman consists of a local stone flaking station, hearths, and thousands of faunal remains including organic implements on mammoth...
Landscape Learning and Climate Change: A Perspective from South-Central Alaska (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The circumpolar north is one of the most rapidly warming places on the planet, resulting in changing vegetation, precipitation, and fire regimes along with altered animal migration cycles. Combined these trends are transforming once familiar places into environments to which people are unaccustomed, perhaps even new...