Archaeology, Environment, & Society
Next weekend (April 30-May 2) I will be participating in the US Theoretical Archaeology Group annual meeting, as part of the session “Archaeology of and for Environmental Justice” (Sunday at 3:45 pm Pacific Time). This year, the conference is fully online and registration is free. I hope to see you there!
This semester (Spring 2021) I have been teaching ARCH1875: Sustainability Past and Present at Brown University. As a final project, students created an assortment of media projects to teach the public about connections between the past and present of human/environment relations. The projects are all fantastic, and I encourage you to check them out at the link below!
By Brenna Hassett, Suzanne Pilaar Birch, Rebecca Wragg Sykes, and Tori Herridge
Stories of pioneering women in the “digging” sciences have been skewed toward those who were White, wealthy, and networked. The TrowelBlazers project aims to reset our imagination—and our future.
For Women’s History Month, it has become traditional to rifle through the great names of the past, pluck out a few that strike the imagination and have the appropriate gender marker, and dust them off for a new audience. We should know—we run the TrowelBlazers project, a largely community-sourced archive of biographies of women in the “digging” sciences: archaeology, geology, and palaeontology.
I will be speaking as part of Félag fornleifafræðinga’s New Research in Icelandic Archaeology (Nýjar Rannsóknir í Fornleifafræði) series this Wednesday at noon Iceland time (8AM EDT). Zoom details will be posted at the link above. Hope to see you there!
Tiny Houses: Small Dwelling Sites during the Settlement Period
Recent research on Hegranes in Skagafjörður has revealed numerous very small dwelling sites dating to the Settlement period. The sites were depopulated by the early 12th century, and while they included a wide range of productive activity, they do not fit easily into existing categories of specialized, seasonal camps or standalone farms. This talk will present an overview of the findings, and will discuss the sites in the context of Icelandic archaeology and the broader medieval Norse world. Small dwelling sites appear to have played a transient but critical role in both the settlement process and the transformation of the Icelandic landscape, as part of a distributed network of farm and non-farm dwellings.
This might just be my best attempt yet at an Icelandic layer cake!
Wishing you all the best for the holidays and the oncoming year.