Perspectives from a Digital Season and New Opportunities of Knowledge Co-production for Arctic Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Impact of the COVID-19 epidemic has been acute in the Arctic, where logistics and community collaborations are time sensitive. Having canceled our 2020 field season in Avanersuaq, Greenland, we decided to continue collaborative work online, while striving to bring Inughuit partners into the process of interpretation. In this paper, we present outcomes of our digital season. We discuss our workflow, how challenges of slow connections and limited data were addressed, and the method we developed to present and take input from community members in the Kalaallisut language. We are not yet satisfied our objectives are achieved in terms of new forms of coauthorship. However, through this work we have glimpsed new potential to challenge traditional modes of knowledge production. The separation of the field from the campus/museum can reinforce power relationships between archaeologists and Inuit communities when it comes to interpretation. Beyond presentation, digital media provides opportunity for communities to participate in interpretation once field crews return home. With archaeologists acquiring new fluencies in digital remote collaboration, we hope an unexpected outcome of the pandemic will be innovation in knowledge coproduction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32903