North America: Arctic and Subarctic (Geographic Keyword)
151-175 (225 Records)
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. The goal in this Master’s Thesis is to collect and systematize data from eight medieval Norse sites in the Tasikuluulik peninsula and use these data to compare with past interpretations regarding the use and purpose of these Norse sites. In past research projects, the eight sites under investigation have...
A New Radiocarbon Dated Record of Holocene Weapon Technology from The Trail Creek Cave Site, Seward Peninsula, Alaska (2018)
The Trail Creek Caves site on the Seward Peninsula in western Alaska was excavated by Helge Larsen in 1949-1950, and is among the most important archaeological sites in central Beringia. It contains a lengthy, rich and well-preserved paleoecological and archaeological record dating to the late Pleistocene, and the largest collections of mid-Holocene age organic tools from the region. However, poor chronological and stratigraphic controls have hampered the interpretive value of the site. New...
No Digging within 50 Meters (2018)
Fort Wainwright Training Lands in Central Alaska have been dedicated to the army mission since the early 1960s with consistent military training to support worldwide deployment. Fort Wainwright’s Donnelly Training Area encompasses over 25,000 acres of maneuver terrain specifically designed for live-fire training of the 1/25th Stryker Brigade. This training area is ideal for missions pertaining to mobilization, off road combat vehicle exercises, and excavation of maneuver positions. The terrain...
No Empty Landscapes: Livelihood, Agency, and Transformation in Early Inuit South Greenland (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. Kujataa—South Greenland—constitutes a verdant environmental niche and was one of the most populous regions in Arctic Greenland, occupied by the Norse between ca. AD 985 and 1450 and Inuit in the following centuries until today. Whereas Norse society has been much studied, Inuit archaeology and history in Kujataa has been...
Northern Brooks Range Caribou Hunting Architecture (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caribou hunting has shaped the cultural landscape of the Alaska Arctic interior. In many cases, this meant intentionally altering local landscapes to the direct advantage of caribou hunters. These engineered landscapes are visible today in various forms of hunting architecture, including stone drive lines, drift fences, cairns, and hunting blinds. Despite...
Nuna Nalluituq / The Land Remembers: Spatial Technology and Community Engagement to Protect Alaska Native Heritage Landscapes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Southwest Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim (YK) Delta, where two immense salmon-bearing rivers flow into the Bering Sea, is the ancestral homeland of the Yup’ik people. This biodiverse subarctic tundra wetland is a landscape in constant flux from the annual cycle of flooding, silting, and...
The Nunalleq Project: Yup’ik Heritage and Community-Based Archaeology in Quinhagak, Alaska (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Nunalleq Project was initiated by the leaders of Qanirtuuq Inc., the ANCSA Village Corporation representing the Yup’ik village of Quinhagak, Alaska. The project was intended to address two locally identified needs: to recover as many artifacts as possible from a rapidly eroding archaeological site and to reconnect young people to Yup’ik...
Obsidian Networks of the Southern Yukon-Alaska Borderlands (2024)
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 archaeological record of Eastern Beringia (Alaska and Yukon) plays an important role in understanding global human dispersals and settlement and is a proving ground for testing ideas about high-latitude hunter-gatherer land use, technology, and socioeconomic interaction. Obsidian provenance studies provide an excellent means...
Of Longhouses and Lineages: Evaluation of Transformations in Maritime Archaic Social Organization in the Far Northeast (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The social organization of Maritime Archaic groups of Newfoundland and Labrador is notoriously difficult to assess due to poor preservational environments, challenging logistics of working in the Subarctic, and a paucity of research directly applicable to such questions; however, a long chronological...
On the Edge of the Colonial Sphere: The Effects of Indirect Interaction on Subsistence Strategies in Northern Alaska (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cabinets of Curiosities: Collections and Conservation in Archaeological Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How did trade participation impact human-environmental interactions? It is known that the fur trade was a significant part of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life in southern Alaska. However, the effects of the fur trade and the whaling industry on northern Alaskan lifeways have been understudied....
On the Practical Use of Knives Manufactured from Human Feces and Saliva: An Experiment (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1996, the anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis recounted in his book "Shadows in the Sun" the tale of an Inuit man who manufactured a knife out of his own feces and saliva as these raw materials froze during the arctic night. With these items he then butchered a dog. Since that time, this story has been told, and retold, on websites, radio...
Parsing the Pits: Cooking Techniques in the Kachemak Period Kodiak Archipelago (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists frequently encounter pits filled with charcoal and fire cracked rock in the archaeological record which testify to past culinary practice. However, it is challenging to determine how these pits were used to cook food from general observation alone. Here I employ paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological analyses to determine how pits were...
Perspectives from a Digital Season and New Opportunities of Knowledge Co-production for Arctic Archaeology (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Impact of the COVID-19 epidemic has been acute in the Arctic, where logistics and community collaborations are time sensitive. Having canceled our 2020 field season in Avanersuaq, Greenland, we decided to continue collaborative work online, while striving to bring Inughuit partners into the process of interpretation. In this paper, we present outcomes...
Pitquhivut Ilihaqtaa: Learning about Our 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. Archaeology in Inuit Nunangat (northern Canada) has a long and varied history of interactions between Inuit communities and "southern" researchers. This paper is about one long-standing example of a successful relationship between an Inuit organization, the Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq / Kitikmeot Heritage Society (PI/KHS) of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, and...
“Place for a Walrus to Haul Out”: Marine Mammals and Polynya Archaeology in Northern Foxe Basin, Nunavut, Arctic Canada (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across Inuit Nunangat (the traditional Inuit territories of what is now Canada), the Little Ice Age (LIA) climate change episode likely resulted in significant changes in seasonal sea-ice abundance, thereby affecting relatively delicate coastal food webs. In this paper, we present the results-to-date of recent survey and excavation at Uglit (NfHd-1), a...
The Porcupine Tail Site Complex and the Concentration of the Archaeological Record on Isolated Hills of 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. The archaeological record in any landscape tends to be differentially concentrated on specific landforms, because such landforms favor both the recurrence of human activities over successive periods of time and the postdepositional preservation of their material traces. In this paper we present results from recent excavations at two...
Precontact Inuit Watercraft and the Hunter-Prey Actantial Hinge (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. Maritime harvesting from watercraft and sea ice was the foundation of precontact Inuit economy throughout the Eastern Arctic, and small watercraft also figured in locally important terrestrial caribou hunts. Boats were everywhere essential to work, travel, and trade during the open...
Precontact Native Copper Innovation in the North American Arctic, Subarctic, and Northwest Coast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precontact Indigenous copper technological practices within the North American Northwest vary along regional, cultural, and temporal axes. After being screened for smelted metals and alloys using pXRF compositional data, we identified multiple significant patterns of...
Prehistoric Hookworm and the Peopling of the Americas: Enhancing Theories Based on Paleoclimate Models and Pathogens (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans brought many things with them when they came to the Americas. This study focuses on hookworms and domesticated dogs to revise, constrain, or enhance theoretical models of when and how humans first came to the Americas. The hookworm life cycle is critically dependent upon the environmental conditions and proximity to suitable hosts. Its eggs leave...
Preliminary Analysis of the Fauna from the McDonald Creek 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. McDonald Creek contains identifiable faunal remains from two primary climatic and cultural time periods: (1) a Younger-Dryas aged occupation, and (2) a pre-Clovis aged occupation dating to ca. 14,000 cal BP. The ca. 14,000 cal BP occupation contains most of the well-preserved...
A Preliminary Spatial Analysis of the Late Pleistocene Components at the McDonald Creek Site, Interior 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. The McDonald Creek site (FAI-2043) is located about 30 miles south of Fairbanks, Alaska, in the Tanana Flats. Results of archaeological testing and excavations between 2013 and 2019 identified three distinct archaeological components, Components 1, 2, and 3 dating to about 13.8...
Prioritization Frameworks and Archaeological Decision-Making in a Changing North (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. The impact of climate change on heritage sites is a subject that is discussed with increasing urgency in arctic archaeology. Frequently used metaphors like “burning libraries” or “ticking clocks” capture the visceral feeling of loss experienced by both archaeologists and Inuit communities who witness destructions firsthand....
Puffin Heads and Albatross Limbs: An Examination of Avifaunal Usage from the Rat Islands, Alaska (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human groups have used birds in a variety of ways, from food, to raw material for tools, to clothing. In addition to their more practical usages, birds often play a significant role in cosmologies and myths. However, due to poor preservation and excavation bias bird remains have only recently begun to be studied in depth. The archaeological sites of the...
Putting the Past in Conversation with the Present: A Collaborative Archaeology of Colonialism in Old Harbor, Kodiak Island, Alaska (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sugpiaq (also known as Alutiiq) people have a more than 7,500-year history on the Kodiak Archipelago and in the surrounding areas. Through that long history, they adapted and invented new technologies, grew from small and mobile communities to large, settled villages, fought and traded with their neighbors, and created a vibrant coastal society....
The Qajartalik Petroglyph Site (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. In 2017, the Canadian government nominated eight places as candidates for future designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. One of those is Qajartalik, located off the coast of Nunavik, where more than 180 anthropomorphic faces were carved into soapstone outcrops between...