Europe: Northern Europe (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (73 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The Health and Welfare of Children in the Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Children played a key role in coal mining and the pottery industry in 19th century Staffordshire (UK). The number of children that worked in this region during the study period fluctuated between 13% and 33%, and one fifth of the workforce comprised of 5-14 year olds. Long working hours and hazardous conditions had a detrimental effect on...
All in One Boat: How to Keep a Raiding Party Together in Bronze Age Southern Scandinavia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For southern Scandinavia, the evidence of use-wear on weapons and of violent encounters settled the long debate over whether prehistoric warfare existed. Much of this violence was driven by waterborne raiding parties and maritime warriors and successful participation in fighting provided a path to social status. Each expedition lasted...
Andra tider, andra seder: Shifting Taskscapes of Gender, Age and Class in Early Sweden (2018)
Anecdotal evidence for rural gender and age-based divisions of labor are known for Medieval and Post-Medieval Sweden, and a handful of historians have discussed their implications in terms of the ‘slices of time’ they represent. Other more continuous geographic and archaeological data address the status of agricultural populations through increased or diminished affordances, economic opportunities, taxation and laws, as well as climate change and demographic transitions. How were these varying...
Archaeological Traces of Consumption of Colonial Goods in Eighteenth Century Gothenburg on the West Coast of Sweden (2018)
The fortified city of Gothenburg was established around 1620, constructed when the Swedish trade intensified its involvement in the world sea commerce. Parts of the fortification, a Garrison Cemetery and two old country estates have been archaeologically excavated as a result of large-scale development of infrastructure in the city. The excavation results give new perspectives on the garrison and its cemetery. Osteological analysis contributes to the interpretation of everyday life among...
Benefits of CT-Scanning in Study of Post-Medieval Funerary Items (2018)
CT-scanning has for long been utilized in the research of mummified individuals, and has been a crucial method used to analyze also northern Finnish mummified human remains. Within Church, Space and Memory -project at the University of Oulu in Finland, eight individuals, mostly children, buried under floor planks of churches have been lifted up with their coffins, and taken for CT-scanning at the Oulu University Hospital. The CT-scans have proved to be suitable also for studying coffins,...
Beyond a Record of Environmental Change: The Influence of Variability in Peat Composition on the Archaeological Record in Viking Age Iceland (2018)
Research suggests non-woody resources, such as peat, can serve as unique repositories of environmental change. This paper discusses how peat serves such a role, and sheds light on the how these processes affect the archaeological record, an aspect of environmental change that has been overlooked. During the colonization of Iceland in the 9th century AD, early Icelanders (Vikings) began to affect and be affected by local environments. Viking colonization led to rapid deforestation of woodland...
Broken Edges: Investigating Jewelry Damage by Violence and Fatigue (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many Scandinavian Migration Period gold bracteate pendants of the 5th and 6th centuries show evidence of pre- or post-depositional damage. Impressions of broken edges of the jewelry were made with polyvinyl siloxane (PVS), and the impressions were then analyzed as part of a larger project to...
Castles in Communities: Recent Findings in the Field (2018)
The archaeological and anthropological field school Castles in Communities, organized by Foothill College, completed its third field season this past summer at the site of Ballintober Castle, County Roscommon, Ireland. The construction of Ballintober Castle (early 14th century) is attributed to the Anglo-Norman Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster. Shortly after its Anglo-Norman occupation, the castle came under Irish control (1381) and has been the property of the O’Conor family ever since. After...
Climate and Heritage in the Arctic: Environmental Monitoring and a New European Standard (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. To respond to climate change impacts as well as other societal and environmental impacts to archaeological preservation, Norway has been applying environmental monitoring of archaeological deposits and sites since the 1990s. To standardize monitoring methods, tools, and evaluations, a Norwegian Standard was implemented in...
Coastal Geocatastrophes as Agents of Change on Multiple Time Scales: A Case Study from the Shetland Islands, UK (2018)
The coasts of northernmost Britain and neighboring North Sea countries offer numerous examples of sand environments that have been both settled and completely abandoned by humans at various times. These areas' rich archaeological records reveal many examples of once-thriving human settlements that were challenged and eventually terminated by burial in aeolian sand over periods ranging from days to decades. The origins and socio-ecological dynamics of these geocatastrophes may reflect important...
Collagen Fingerprinting on Neolithic Fish from Lithuania (2018)
Archaeological fish remains are more taphonomically sensitive than those of other vertebrates as they are typically smaller and less biomineralised. Therefore, it is essential to retrieve as much information as possible from assemblages that favour their preservation. One of the most time- and cost-efficient methods of objectively achieving faunal identity in ancient bone is collagen fingerprinting technique ‘ZooMS’ (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry). ZooMS harnesses the potential of...
Cult and Cultivation: Vulnerability and Resilience on Inishark Island, Co. Galway, Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Critics of new materialism caution that focus on the active qualities of materials and the distributed agency of assemblages obscures the cruelties of inequality that allow the powerful to do as they will and others to suffer what they must. Engaging such critiques, this paper examines the famines in nineteenth-century...
The Diachronic Landscape of Ceremony at the Irish "Royal" Site of Dun Ailinne (2018)
The site of Dún Ailinne (Knockaulin) in County Kildare is one of four major ceremonial sites of the Irish Iron Age. Although numerous ceremonial centers of various size dotted the Irish landscape, Dún Ailinne, along with Teamhair (Tara), Emain Macha (Navan Fort), and Crúachain (Rathcroghan,) stand out due to their size and location. These characteristics indicate that the sites would have been major foci of ceremonial activity, and would have impacted the ceremonial activity itself. Although...
Driftwood, a Lifeline in the Arctic: Production of Artifacts from Driftwood in Northwest Iceland and Norse Greenland (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. Iceland was settled by the Norse in the late ninth century and Greenland was settled from Iceland around AD 1000. Although these countries are quite dissimilar in landscape and geology, they have a similar flora in which the only forest-forming tree is birch. Birch alone...
Environmental Threats To Viking Age and Medieval Norse Sites in Southwestern Greenland (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. This presentation is one of the products of a series of ongoing inter-connected, international, interdisciplinary fieldwork projects coordinated by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) research cooperative since 2005 in Greenland. The projects drew upon more than a...
Environmental Variation and the Sustainability of Farms: Investigating Effects of Erosion in Northern Iceland (2018)
The initial colonization of Iceland in the late 9th century had a profound impact on the fragile environment of the North Atlantic island. Settlement and the introduction of livestock resulted in widespread erosion and the replacement of woodlands with meadows and heaths. Changes in the environment are assumed to have played a role in determining settlement patterning and subsistence strategies. While marginal highland areas were most seriously affected, resulting in farmstead abandonment, the...
Explaining Variation in the Scale of Neolithic Quarry and Mine Production (2018)
In recent years new methods have been developed for using summed radiocarbon probabilities as a population proxy and for comparing radiocarbon datasets to establish whether they are significantly different from one another, while taking into account sampling variation and the patterns in the calibration curve. On the basis of newly collected and updated radiocarbon data on the dating of Neolithic mines and quarries in in Britain, Ireland and continental Northwest Europe, the paper will present...
Feeding Stonehenge: The Potential of Coprolites as Tools for Reconstructing Diet (2018)
The Feeding Stonehenge project combined zooarchaeology with pottery residue analysis to explore the diets and provisioning of the inhabitants of Neolithic Durrington Walls, the settlement associated with the construction of the iconic Stonehenge monument in southern Britain. A lack of preserved plant remains at the site, and an overwhelming dominance of porcine and ruminant lipids in the pottery, suggests that animal products were the major source of nutrition. This research tests this...
Female Warriors of the Viking Age (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In my presentation I will explore how women in the Viking age contributed to acts of violence by looking into three different cases of burials containing women with weapons and armaments. I will draw these studies from my original Master’s thesis published in 2017 and focus solely on the archaeological evidence,...
Finder-Collectors: Untapped Potential for Collaborative Engaged Scholarship (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Avocationals including metal detectorists can be defined as finder-collectors. This includes people who keep collections, including objects they have themselves found, but also possibly objects that they have acquired through purchasing, swapping, gifting, or by other means. This category expressly does not include people who loot but does include...
The Follo Railroad Environmental Monitoring Project in Medieval Oslo, Norway (2018)
In conjunction with a large urban infrastructure project, renewing the Norwegian railroad through the listed monument of the Medieval town of Oslo, an environmental monitoring programme was established. The Medieval town consists of extensive archaeological remains preserved in situ. The monitoring programme focusses on the following questions: What is the influence of building an encased railroad next to a medieval monument? How are the unsaturated conditions influenced next to the new...
A GIS Approach to Understanding Post-sedentary Hunter-Gatherers: A Case from Northern Finland (2018)
This paper considers post-sedentism in hunter-gatherers: how the fact of having previously been sedentary affects the behaviour of societies that increase their mobility in response to changing environmental conditions. The case-study in question is the transition in Northern Finland from a sedentary Sub-Neolithic, supported by high concentrations of marine resources in the river estuaries of the region, to an increasingly mobile adaptation in the Early Metal and Iron Ages. Although village...
The Inequalities of Households – Cemetery Management and Social Change in Early Medieval Iceland (2018)
In AD 1000 Icelanders adopted Christianity in an apparently swift and embracive fashion. The new tradition was implemented by discrete households that built private churches and cemeteries on their farms. These cemeteries were in use until the beginning of the 12th century and interred were all individuals of the household, men and women, the old and the young, householders and servants. The establishment, management, and abandonment sequences of these cemeteries reflect the religious, social,...
Interpreting ‘Irishness’ in the Archaeological Record: A Northern Ireland Perspective (2018)
The northern Irish town of Carrickfergus, in the seventeenth century, was a thriving settlement; home to a mixed population of English and Scottish settlers, in addition to a local Gaelic-Irish population. As such, the excavated material evidence is particularly suited to considerations of how we interpret, and eventually ascribe, identity in the archaeological record. Cultural identity, and expressions of such identity – be that Irishness, Britishness, or Ulster Scottishness – lie at the heart...
Investigating Mobility through Oxygen Stable Isotopes from the Medieval Cemetery at Kilroot, County Antrim, Northern Ireland (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mobility is the movement of people across distances, often within cultural or political boundaries, and is influenced by economic, religious, and social processes including individual identities. Anthropologists evaluate mobility of past peoples through oxygen stable isotopes, a biochemical measure to assess long-term water consumption influenced by...