Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For 40 years, the archaeology of the North and North Atlantic has become increasingly productive. Interdisciplinary work grounded in environmental archaeology has crosscut local, national, and regional boundaries to produce significant advances in methodology, collaborative practice, and human-ecodynamic interpretations. However, studies of northern material culture have been less transformative and often remain limited by regional, period-specific, or material-specific intellectual traditions that relegate objects to the category of "small finds" and to studies that focus primarily on functional, chronological, or typological analyses. SANNA is a project bringing together northern archaeologists interested in looking beyond the immediate or visible characteristics of material culture. SANNA 3.0 focuses on the creation, use, meaning, interpretation, discard, and/or reuse of "portable artifacts": items smaller than architecture or landscapes that not only create intimate bonds in domestic contexts but also link humans, animals, and nonhuman worlds in various ways and at diverse social scales. The presentations in this symposium not only look at how objects circulated, were used, and had social meaning in the past but also at how they gain new social lives when we, as archaeologists, and others—including descendant communities and the public—encounter them again and give them new meanings.