Post-Doc, National Museum of Natural History, Anthropology
postdoctoral research fellow/research collaborator
Arctic Studies Center
Thesis Title: The Evolution of Maritime Archaic Households in Northern Labrador
David Meltzer
Torben Rick
About
As an anthropological archaeologist, my research focuses on transformation of prehistoric and protohistoric economies through the examination of cultural contact and human-environment relationships. I am interested in how and why people modified their societies and subsistence-settlement strategies to adjust to new variants introduced within their cultural ranges through environmental change and direct economic competition from other cultures. I am particularly fascinated by periods in which traditional economies were threatened by environmental change, whether natural or cultural, and adaptational flexibility was limited due to being circumscribed by other populations or physical boundaries. The options for people in these situations are variants of conflict, economic cooperation and/or diversification, assimilation, abandonment, and extinction. Which of these are chosen depends greatly on the social structure of the populations involved, as well as the resource structure of the region. Understanding these structures and why choices were made in the past, and the results of those choices, has important implications for modern and future populations dealing with varying degrees of climatic and environmental change, either through major modifications of their economies or substantial demographic shifts.
I have pursued these interests in numerous ways and in several regions; however, my primary focus has been on northern coastal populations. In 2008, with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Labrador Inuit Nunatsiavut government, and other smaller grants, I finished my dissertation entitled: A Study of the Evolution of Maritime Archaic Households in Northern Labrador. I examined social, economic, and environmental influences on the reorganization of Maritime Archaic society, through an investigation of the development of their residential architecture, from single-family pithouses to large longhouses. That same year I initiated a new, multi-year project with grants provided by the Provincial Archaeology Office of Newfoundland and Labrador examining two important, but virtually unstudied, cultural transitions on the island of Newfoundland. The first was the Dorset Paleoeskimo-Recent Indian horizon, a period from roughly 1500-1100 BP in which the Dorset gradually abandoned the island and the Recent Indian populations continued to thrive. The second period is the Recent Indian-European horizon, from the 16th century to the mid-19th century at which time the historic descendents of the Recent Indians, the Beothuk, became extinct. Both periods ended in extinction of local populations on the island, and early evidence suggests environmental change and economic competition both played major roles.
In 2010, with funding through a NSF grant, I will become lead on an international collaborative research project in Chukotka, Siberia studying the origins of whaling in the Bering Strait Region and evaluating the reasons for the addition of active whaling to their economy. Its focus will be on the Un’en’en site, a site that has already garnered international attention in Science and Nature because it contains the earliest evidence for active whaling in the Arctic–a 3000 year-old carved ivory zoomorphic object with an inscription of people in boats hunting whales. The site may also be related to the contemporaneous and enigmatic Old Whaling culture, known only from the type site at Cape Krusenstern across the Strait in Alaska. Funding proposals will be submitted this year to several granting agencies to expand on the promising initial research at Un’en’en.
As a postdoctoral research fellow with the Arctic Studies Center and Museum Conservation Institute of the Smithsonian Institution, I am examining the procurement and movement of slate by the Maritime Archaic of Newfoundland and Labrador. I am primarily using a portable X-ray fluorescence instrument to categorize lithic source materials and assess exchange networks of those materials across that region in order to increase our understanding of the economic structure of that cultural tradition, how it changed through time, and how those changes correlate to environmental and demographic fluctuations.
While the main body of my career has centered on northern coastal populations, I have been part of several research projects that have provided me a broad perspective concerning archaeological research, a perspective that I bring to my classrooms and research. For several years, I was a member of Dr. David Meltzer’s Paleoindian research team examining Paleoindian sites throughout Texas, Colorado, and the Great Plains. I continue to collaborate with Dr. Torben Rick of the Smithsonian Institution on Holocene shell midden sites from California’s Northern Channel Islands, aimed at understanding human-environment interaction. I also continue to work with Kevin Smith, of the Haffenreffer Museum at Brown University, and Michelle Smith studying early state formation and craft production in the Viking Age of Iceland, and have conducted research in the Western Sahara of Egypt with Dr. Fred Wendorf of Southern Methodist University.
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