Europe: Northern Europe (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsty Squires.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Horn.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. L. Thurston.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carina Bramstång Plura. Petra Nordin.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Soderberg.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland triggered a complex swirl of changes that presage dynamics of European colonialism in modern times. One key pattern is the emergence of divides between Anglo-Norman (colonizer) and Gaelic (indigenous) identities. Negotiating differences between “being Anglo-Norman”...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sanna Lipkin. Titta Kallio-Seppä. Annemari Tranberg. Erika Ruhl. Sirpa Niinimäki.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheila Bonde. Clark Maines.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our paper will survey in critical fashion the last 20 years of medieval monastic archaeology in France. During that time, the new research directions of the late 1990s have confronted a changed landscape for archaeological work. The creation of INRAP has meant that fewer university-sponsored...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Sawyer.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Hansen.

This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological work on the people known as the Picts of northern Britain (ca. 300–900 CE) has revealed that many of the Picts’ characteristic monuments and structures made use of materials previously made significant in prehistory. A portion of the Pictish “symbol stones”— a class of stone monuments...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Wicker.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While interdisciplinarity in archaeology increasingly has blurred the borders between humanities and sciences, an additional boundary in archaeology exists between what is considered Iron Age and what is medieval. The terms have been defined largely from the Continental point of view. In the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Wicker.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Ellis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent decades, more archaeological scholarships have been dedicated to understanding the types of exchanges that were occurring in the Viking world in the early Medieval period. Particularly, Gotland remains one of the key trading centers regarding smithed exported silver. Looking broadly at Gotland and its relations to other periphery sites, such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Brody. Rebekah Mills.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vibeke Martens. Jens Rytter.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerald F. Bigelow. Michael E. Jones. Casey Oehler.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Harvey. Linas Daugnora. Mike Buckley.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davide Zori.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Viking Age migrations that settled the North Atlantic resulted in a diaspora, creating a series of colonies that looked back to Scandinavia for their shared historical identity. This paper focuses on the diasporic experience in Iceland and the formation of a new Icelandic ethnic identity....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Wilson. T L Thurston.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Christianization in Northern Europe’s first millennium CE has been intensively studied by numerous disciplines and is often viewed as a cause or outcome of social, political, and economic changes. Christianity arrived at different times through differing processes, far better understood in some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Lash.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zenobie Garrett.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lísabet Guðmundsdóttir.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nysa Loudon.

This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the last 30 years of ancient textile and cordage research, new and revisited archaeological evidence and ethnographic studies have shown that prehistoric people in Europe were using a wider range of plant species to produce cordage, netting, mats, and textiles than previously thought. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Konrad Smiarowski. Christian Madsen. Michael Nielsen. Jette Arneborg.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Welch O'Connor. Douglas J. Bolender.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Schauer. Kevan Edinborough. Stephen Shennan. Andrew Bevan. Mike Parker Pearson.

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...