arctic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Farrell. Peter Jordan. Rick Knecht. Oliver Craig.

Despite major environmental challenges, pottery was manufactured and used by Palaeo- and Neo-Eskimos in Alaska for millennia. To better understand why pottery was used by Alaskan hunter-gatherers, the authors have undertaken a number of site-based organic residue analyses that provide direct biomolecular and isotopic evidence for the contents of past pots. The ubiquitous presence of aquatic biomarkers, along with compound specific isotope data, show that pottery use at the sites was consistently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Whitridge.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Savelle.

Prehistoric Thule Inuit in the Canadian Arctic were pre-eminent whalers, focussing on the bowhead whale, the largest prey species hunted by any prehistoric or historic hunter-gatherer society. The ethnographic literature provides a rich source of information dealing not only with the importance of bowheads in the diet of early historic bowhead-hunting Inuit societies, but also how social structure, ritual, symbolism and ideology were all centered on complex Thule-bowhead relationships. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Hockett.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Walls. Mari Kleist. Remi Mereuze. Cecilia Porter.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Gjesfjeld. William Brown. Ben Fitzhugh.

One of the persisting challenges in archaeological network analysis is how to incorporate both temporal and spatial information into network models generated from the archaeological record. This paper tackles this issue by introducing a protocol that places probabilistic weights on potential network connections between archaeological sites, combining time-varying probabilities quantifying contemporaneous site occupation and space-dependent probabilities based on geographic distance. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ariel Taivalkoski.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hollis Miller.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Ryan. Elsa Cencig. Susan Lofthouse. Tommy Weetaluktuk.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Temple.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social complexity is a term that often refers to the evolution of inequality in human populations along socioeconomic scales. This concept is historically traceable to unilineal evolutionary paradigms where reduced complexity is often defined based on othering in comparison to Western industrialized capitalism. This study...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Ritchey. Heather Trigg.

This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Viking Age, the Norse settled Iceland, a sub-arctic volcanic island at the climatic margin of cereal production. These settlers brought with them a distinctive subsistence economy involving animal husbandry and cereal production, most notably barley. Barley (Hordeum vulgare) has been noted by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Walker. Kathyrn Kotar. James Savelle. Arthur Dyke.

The increasing accessibility of archaeological data from the Canadian Arctic has promoted a recent influx of macro-scale analyses. Drawing insights from our ongoing research project in the Foxe Basin region, we address some challenges regarding the synthesis of archaeological information, especially as it pertains to Paleo-Inuit studies. We discuss the importance of data quality and address issues of variability in occupation density, duration, and seasonality, both at the household and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aka Simonsen Bendtsen.

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. Western views (mindsets), practices, and methodologies have dominated all scientific enquiries, including archaeology, which is inherently colonizing because they assume that Western knowledge is superior to Indigenous knowledge (Smith 1999). Such approaches have led “scientists” to merely take knowledge...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Kelvin. Lisa Rankin.

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. Settler colonialism is a disruption of Indigenous relationships. As a tool of settler colonialism, archaeology and collecting in particular have caused a disruption of relationships between Indigenous people, their land, their (in)tangible cultural heritage (Gray 2022), their Ancestors, and their pasts,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Owen Mason.

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. Archaeological discourse can remain in thrall to classificatory and theoretical constructs. “Near Ipiutak” was framed by Larsen and Rainey in 1948 within the penumbra of the hundreds of Ipiutak ruins, <1 km distant, that resulted from an aceramic, non-whaling habitus and aestheticized mortuary practice....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Howard Higgins.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community-Based Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1974-76 I conducted ethnoarchaeological research among the Tahltan Indians of northwestern British Columbia. Like many native groups, from the early 1800’s into the 1940’s, the Tahltan were repeatedly decimated by epidemics. These killed disproportionately- with many old and very young dying. The loss of the elder women (the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliette Taieb. Claire Alix. Glenn P. Juday. Owen K. Mason. Christophe Petit.

This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first and only millennial tree-ring chronology (AD 978–1941) in northwest Alaska was developed in the 1940s by archaeologist and dendrochronology pioneer J. L. Giddings. Constructed from living trees and archaeological samples from the Kobuk River valley, Giddings’s sequence established the chronology of the “Arctic Woodland Culture.” As Alaskan...

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 Dennis G. Griffin.

St. Matthew and Hall islands are located in the Bering Sea, far from the Alaskan mainland. First discovered by the Russians between 1764 and 1766, little attempt was made to occupy or utilize these islands until 1809 when a fur hunting expedition was sent to St. Matthew to over-winter. In 2012, the USF&WS sent an archaeologist to attempt to locate the site of this earlier Russian hunting camp with archaeological investigations focused on the testing of an earlier identified cabin site on St....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Jensen.

Walakpa is an iconic Arctic site with spectacular preservation. Sadly, the once stable site began eroding rapidly in 2013, with ongoing erosion outpacing attempts to obtain traditional funding for excavation. The loss of cultural heritage led to growing international volunteer efforts, starting in 2015, with support from the landowner (an Alaska Native village corporation) and many individuals. I will discuss both the success and challenges of this type of project. Walakpa is only one of many...

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 Tammy Buonasera. Antonio V. Herrera-Herrera. Carolina Mallol.

This is an abstract from the "Charred Organic Matter in the Archaeological Sedimentary Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Molecular and isotopic analyses of sediments from archaeological combustion features is a relatively new area of study. Applications have the potential to inform us about ancient pyro-technologies and patterns of animal exploitation in a wide range of human contexts but may be particularly informative with regards to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susannah Clinker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gut-sewing technology was utilized by Inuit communities until the early 20th century. Despite gut-sewing being a successful and advantageous technology for thousands of years, it is scarcely practiced today. This is in part due to the availability of synthetic materials but also because these kinds of traditional practices have been lost over generations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Schmuck. Risa J. Carlson. James F. Baichtal.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Shaheen area on the west coast of Prince of Wales Island, Southeast Alaska is a crenulated stretch of coastline protected from outside waters and fed by multiple freshwater streams. Paleoshoreline modeling following Carlson and Baichtal's predictive model (2015) suggested areas suitable for early Holocene settlement. Recent investigations have identified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carola Flores-Fernandez. Veronica Alcalde. Laura Olguin. Jimena Torres. Diego Salazar.

Fishing was a crucial aspect in the lifeway of ancient coastal societies. Along the Pacific Coast, the appearance of shell fishhooks has been interpreted as part of different contexts of growing population, economic specialization, and social complexity, among others. Along the coast of the Atacama Desert (18° to 26° Lat. South), fishhooks on Choromytilus chorus shells (mussel) appear in archaeological sites located along 1.6 thousand kilometers of coast with dates around 7500 years BP. Around...