Europe: Northern Europe (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terje Oestigaard.

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although cannibalism is a contested theme in anthropology, there is one area and era that has received little attention: Scandinavian folklore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The widely documented practices...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Byock.

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. Presents recent findings of the Mosfell Archaeological Project (MAP) in Iceland’s Mosfell Valley (Mosfellsdalur). Reviews excavations at Leiruvogur Bay at the coastal mouth of the valley and at Hrísbrú, the farmstead of the Mosfell chieftains. These two Viking Age sites formed a 10th century...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Steinman. Michele Hayeur Smith. Soumen Mallick.

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. North Atlantic islands were colonized by settlers from Norway and the British Isles in the ninth century, bringing agricultural practices from Northern Europe. Wool and fish dominated exports from Iceland from the Viking Age, although the impact of the wool trade remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Britton.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For more than a century, Paleolithic Scotland was missing from the textbooks, presumed nonexistent. A low-density of archaeological finds was compounded by a research tradition that persistently excluded the possibility of human settlement at the extreme edge of north-west Europe prior to the Holocene, a situation at odds...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Avner Goldstein.

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. Oyster shells have been discovered across multiple sites in Britain, often as part of shell middens which have been interrupted almost exclusively as food refuse. But whether inland or by the sea, people in Britain had used oysters and other molluscs to help make their religion. Oyster shells...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Brody.

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. In what ways did early medieval people of the Atlantic Archipelago encounter parasitic worms within and about their bodies, and how did these gutsy matters affect their daily lived experiences? To begin answering these questions, we should consider, alongside environmental archaeological data, textual sources in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Dwyer.

For decades, paleoethnobotanical research almost exclusively concentrated on reconstructing past subsistence economies. At 2011’s SAA conference, I presented a paper entitled, Toward A Paleoethnomedicine. I suggested that paleoethnobotanical research should take inspiration from ethnomedicine (a subfield of ethnobotany) and concentrate on analyzing past people’s healing practices and performances. This paper presents a method to operationalize this concept, a technique for analyzing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Cannell. Lars Gustavsen.

This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jellhaug, Norway, is Scandinavia’s second largest prehistoric mound. Dating from the (pre)Viking period, it has a long history of human interaction and interpretation. Built in phases with distinct, selected, and transformed earthly materials, the mound compares with contemporary mounds in that both the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Buchanan. Sarah Semple. Sue Harrington.

Early medieval Britain witnessed dramatic changes to the socio-cultural landscape due to the withdrawal of Roman authority, climatic change, and the arrival of migrants from the continent and from different regions of Britain. The analytical and scientific analysis of the burial record, from a landscape perspective, allows an investigation of key questions related to the scope and nature of this migration, the development of social identity, and how portions of Britain expanded from small...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Cartwright.

This is an abstract from the "Small Things Unforgotten" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Board games, from a psychological standpoint, have been seen as a reflection of skill, cunning, wisdom, and intelligence. Since most board games were developed in order to hone one’s skills in a certain area of life, the presence of them in graves should indicate a level of intellectual prowess. However, from an archaeological viewpoint, the presence of board...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Raffield.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Viking Age was a time of upheaval and disruption across the northern world. Beginning in the late eighth century CE, historical documents attest to a surge of viking raiding into western Europe. By the mid-ninth century, predatory raiding fleets are recorded as operating across the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Bond. Stephen Dockrill. Nicole Burton.

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 Knowe of Swandro, (Orkney Islands, Scotland) was a large settlement occupied from around 800 BCE to CE 1200 and consists of Iron Age roundhouses, Pictish buildings, and a Viking/Norse settlement, much of which has already been lost to the sea. A substantial Iron Age roundhouse that had been occupied for many generations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Catlin. Douglas Bolender.

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. Historical accounts of the Viking Age settlement of Iceland largely focus on the lives of elite colonists and landowners. Although these texts are clear that non-elite and enslaved individuals were present and played a critical role in the settlement of the island, archaeological researchers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. L. Thurston.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Into the earlier, local common pool resource systems of Iron Age and early medieval Scandinavia, the increasingly incompatible taxation and land tenure concepts of developing state governments were imposed on Arctic and peri-Arctic populations. This paper examines the archaeological and historic record of conflicts, disputes, and uprisings that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramona Harrison.

Siglunes is one of a series of endangered sites in N Iceland where we investigate: the emergence and long-term development of Icelandic fisheries and marine mammal hunting, the changing connections between Eyjafjörður and the larger North Atlantic trade and exchange during the Viking Age and medieval times, processes of marine erosion and its effect on archaeological sites for heritage management efforts in Iceland and the wider region. The site’s archaeological and environmental samples can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramona Harrison.

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. The combination of deep sea fishing and dried fish production, and its distribution to inland consumers, is a distinctive and largely Nordic contribution to European diet and economy of eventual global impact in the 14th -17th centuries. One of the main questions is how and when this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Ritchey. Grace Cesario.

This is an abstract from the "Small Dwellings on the Viking Frontier: New Research from Kotið, North Iceland" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present food production data from the 2022–2023 excavations at Kotið, a small, non-elite Viking Age (ninth century AD) domestic dwelling located in Skagafjörður, North Iceland. Macrobotanical and zooarchaeological remains provide key data to better understand early subsistence strategies, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Knut Ivar Austvoll.

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A pungent statement in *The Dawn of Everything* is that the enormous diversity in hunter-gatherer societies makes it impossible to talk about one transition to agriculture. There are several consequences to this statement. One is that hunter-gatherers did not wait for an inevitable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D'aundra Lewis.

For millennial alcohol has played a prevalent role in the development of communities and human interaction. Scotland is well known for the creation of whisky that made its way to America during the Colonial Period. The goal of this research is to identify the influence alcohol has had on the development of Scotland. Scotland whisky distribution has caused a change in laws, economics, health perspective, and tradition. According to Bill Walker, "Scotch whisky is more than a whisky. It is part of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Merit Hondelink.

This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeobotanical remains of several cesspits and wells from Delft were analyzed to determine if “preparation marks,” marks on plant remains resulting from specific preparation methods, are present and if these marks can be used to differentiate between kitchen refuse and consumption waste or excrement. By combining the results from archaeobotanical analysis with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Sanmark.

This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will address Viking-age ritual sites (cult sites assembly (thing) sites) in Scandinavia and Iceland from the perspective of their seasonality. These sites were used for gatherings of various kinds seemingly at certain points of the calendar year. Calendrical rituals formed a key part of Viking-age religion,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Knut Ivar Austvoll.

Along the northwestern coast of Scandinavia the reliance and utilisation of the sea set the stage for a more advanced sociopolitical organization. The technological innovations prompted by the Late Neolithic (i.e. ship technology), turned the sea into a connective arena of interaction and trade. This is seen with the widespread distribution of finely crafted Jutish flint daggers from Late Neolithic I, followed by a steady increase of metal, burial mounds, and settlement sites in Late Neolithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zenobie Garrett.

This is an abstract from the "On the Periphery or the Leading Edge? Research in Prehistoric Ireland" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Dún Ailinne (Knockaulin) in County Kildare is one of four major ceremonial sites of the Irish Iron Age. The site sits on a large, isolated hill in an otherwise flat landscape on which a large earthen bank and ditch encloses approximately 13 ha of land at the top. Excavations in the 1960s-1970s, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Delvaux.

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. Viking ships were slave ships. Between 750 and 1100 CE, clinker-built vessels were used across Northern Europe on raids for collecting captives and transporting them on routes that linked the North Atlantic to Central Asia. We have extensive knowledge about these ships through a unique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Troskosky. Erika Ruhl. Sarah Hoffman. Torill Christine Lindstrøm. Ezra Zubrow.

Islands are both understudied and spatially constrained, with often turbulent colonial histories. This paper reconsiders the conceptual basis of intra- and inter-island relationships in the context of archaeology. We argue that islands need not be isolated as geographic, ecologic or cultural entities and have not been so during the proto-historic and prehistoric periods. Using 21st century equilibrium theory and gateway theory we suggest that islands may be in some contexts central places. We...