North America: Arctic and Subarctic (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacinda Sinclair.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Alix.

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. Analyses of wood remains and artifact assemblages, while remaining few, are nevertheless developing in many areas of the American Arctic and the North Atlantic, providing a rich, diverse database for site or regional comparisons. At the same time, research on changing driftwood circulation and provenance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Guilfoyle. Jen Smith. Genevieve Carey. Jenna May. Robert Bearheart.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophia Marion.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laurence Forget Brisson. Michel Lamothe. François Hardy. Kelly E. Graf.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolette Edwards.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miranda LaZar. Joshua Reuther. Scott Shirar. Liza Mack. Nicole Misarti.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Jensen.

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. Management of, and research on, cultural heritage in the Alaskan Arctic has changed significantly. The changes were much needed and long overdue, but they have brought new challenges to all parties. Accelerating permafrost degradation and coastal erosion have made traditional management strategies no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Precious Johnson. April Hill.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlyn Hosken. Travis Shinabarger.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Richie.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Hill.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nineteenth-century Inuit and Yupiit living on the coasts and islands of the North Pacific inhabited a landscape populated by spirits, animal persons, and object-beings. Human observance of rules and rituals was necessary, but not sufficient, to regulate this fluid, animated ecosystem. Magical practices, deeply embedded in relational ontologies,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Strawhacker. Peter Pulsifer. Noor Johnson. Shari Gearheard.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Haley McCaig.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caribou drive systems are often noted peripherally to important archaeology sites in the Alaska Arctic and are generally assumed to result from late Precontact and early Postcontact hunting strategies. However, little research has been conducted that attempts to date these hunting features. This poster outlines preliminary dating results from a recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Simeonoff. Samantha Fladd.

This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists view deposition as existing at an interesting crossroads: it is both fundamental to our basic understandings of site formation and easy to dismiss as unintentional or of secondary importance. Detailed discussions occur most frequently either to explain away issues with the archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. James Dixon.

Dennis Stanford was first introduced to Alaskan archaeology in 1966 as a field assistant to Robert L Humphrey during an archaeological survey in the Utukok River valley in the western Brooks Range. At the urging of John M. ("Jack") Campbell he began work near Point Barrow in 1968 to investigate controversial questions about the origins of Thule culture. Following brief investigations at the Utkiavik site, he focused his excavations south of Barrow at Walakpa, where he discovered more than 20...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Krasinski. Laura Rojas. Alexander Bautista. Charles Holmes. Barbara Crass.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Approximately 1000 years ago, the archaeological record of Southcentral and interior Alaska shows a shift toward the increased use of fish caches, semi-subterranean houses, permanent year-round villages, and the appearance of ranked societies. Ultimately, the highly mobile big game hunter-gatherer way of life was supplanted by more intensive resource...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Derian. Paul Szpak.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite their prevalence in zooarchaeological assemblages across Inuit Nunangat (the Inuit homeland), there is a paucity of information in the ethnographic and zooarchaeological literature about Inuit and Paleo-Inuit relationships with arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus). Furthermore, the information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Fletcher.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although field notebooks are created as a resource for future archaeologists to reference in their research, the labor required to digitize handwritten notes presents a barrier to their incorporation in state-of-the-art computational analyses. In this research, I explore if image pre-processing can improve the accuracy of text extracted from handwritten...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Youri Van Den Hurk. Sean Desjardins. Emily Ruiz Puerta. Anne Karin Hufthammer. James Barrett.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we compare historic Atlantic walrus commercial and subsistence exploitation in Svalbard (Norway) and Foxe Basin (Arctic Canada), respectively. Data are drawn from osteometric analysis of zooarchaeological surface remains at harvest locales (examined both in situ and in museum collections). In studying harvest strategies of the same species...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Ryan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Dorset PalaeoInuit (Tuniit in Inuit traditional knowledge) are a culturally extinct group who lived throughout much of the eastern North American Arctic between about 2500 and 700 years ago. They are best known for their art, primarily two- and three-dimensional carvings, which range from highly naturalistic to highly abstract. Ubiquitous amongst the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Willky Joseph. Sofie Sogaard.

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. Community driven approaches to archaeological research have provided the discipline with new and creative opportunities for engagement and dialogue. This poster explores the benefits of community engagement in the context of the k-12 classroom as part of a the NSF funded research,Temyiq Tuyuryaq; a collaborative archaeology the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Norman.

This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During and for a few hundred years after the Thule Inuit migration around AD 1200, early Thule groups in the North American Arctic established village sites in new locations where they maintained a similarity in ceremonial architecture, house form, and division of space, despite the variability of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Konrad Smiarowski. Michael Nielsen.

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. This presentation is one of the products of a series of ongoing interconnected, international, interdisciplinary fieldwork projects coordinated by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) research cooperative since 2005 in Greenland. The projects drew on more than a century of prior field research, where four...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Barnett.

Ashmore and others have taken the time to observe and discuss the inherently gendered ‘nature’ of the landscape. As an indigenous scholar this discussion directs me toward concepts of "nature" and specifically, our mother earth, our peoples, and our celestial beings. Mother earth is impregnated with our past, cradling our lives and our ancestors in her womb, from which they once came, and returning (for matters within our discipline) to us in "archaeological context", if you will. I argue that...