Norse Textiles at the Western Edge of the North Atlantic.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Anna Kertulla’s vision of Arctic research incorporated a desire to see female scholars succeed and work on issues pertaining to women’s lives in the North. Three NSF-funded grants from Arctic Social Sciences, focusing on textiles as women’s production, used over 1500 textiles from Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, and Scotland to emphasize the work of women in the North Atlantic’s past and have helped contribute to a gendered archaeology of the North.

In this paper, I will focus on textiles from Norse Greenland, where new data indicates that the emergence of weft-dominant cloth was a strategic response by Greenlandic women to climatic deterioration at the start of the Little Ice Age. Moving farther west, new NSF-funded research on sporadic textile finds from the Canadian Eastern Arctic demonstrates that while the Norse did travel these northern seas, and interacted with Indigenous people, leaving evidence including vaðmál from Skraeling Island and northwest Greenland, they did teach not the Dorset to spin as was previously assumed. In these NSF funded projects, textiles have been analyzed as valuable expressions of culture, rich with meaning and significance, providing new details about Norse subsistence, culture and life style at the edge of the medieval European world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23325