Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Caretaking Of Eve Online: Institutional Ethics And Enactments At Ccp Games, Joshua William Rivers

Theses and Dissertations

This ethnography examines the Icelandic video game developer CCP Games, the makers of EVE Online—a massively-multiplayer online game (MMO) that takes place in a star cluster far, far away. Through my exploration of CCP Games as an institution over the span of fourteen months, I highlight how corporations are culturally-situated, enacted entities. Simultaneously, I demonstrate that these culturally-located actors who serve as the architects of our digital infrastructures undertake such efforts from their situated vantage points, thereby embedding particular ethical commitments into the digital landscapes they craft and within which we live our social lives. Created with the intent to …

Historical Ecology Of Norse Greenland: Zooarchaeology And Climate Change Responses, Konrad Smiarowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis invokes Historical Ecology approach to better understand human impacts on marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and the creation of cultural landscapes and seascapes in Norse Greenland. It also investigates climate impacts on human economic strategies, as they vary substantially by island and region in the North Atlantic but were especially important in arctic Greenland.

The analysis centers on the animal bone data and uses both existing and newly generated zooarchaeological collections to contribute to the study of Norse Greenland and its place in human ecodynamics research. The newly analyzed archaeofauna shows that the culturally Nordic European settlers used to …

Preliminary Report 2021: Coring And Excavations At Hof In Hjaltadalur, John M. Steinberg, Zachary N. Guttman, Guðný Zoëga

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

This report outlines the 2021 work at Hof as part of the Hjaltadalur Archaeological Survey Project (HASP). The results of soil coring suggest that the site of Hof is relatively small compared to other settlement farms. The footprint of the farmstead expands substantially after the 11^th Century. The midden from the 11^th and 12^th centuries appears to be located just north of the main farmhouse (Hof 1). Cores from this area show an abundance of midden on either side of the white AD 1104 tephra. There is a notable absence of post-1300 midden deposits. The excavation unit …

Marine Resource Specialization In Viking Age Iceland: Exploitation Of Seabirds And Fish On Hegranes In Skagafjörður, Grace M. Cesario

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the zooarchaeology of four Viking Age sites on Hegranes, located in Skagafjörður, north Iceland, in order to understand the early economy of the region and place it in a broader context with other settlement sites across the island. This research helps to understand the ways the earliest people in Iceland provided for themselves through niche construction activities that included landscape domestication, animal husbandry, bird hunting, and fishing. It also looks at the zooarchaeological indicators of household autonomy to understand the early social and political landscape in Skagafjörður. At these sites, there is evidence for a specialized …

Commmunity, Ecology, And Modernity: Faunal Analysis Of Skútustaðir In Mývatnssveit, Northern Iceland, Megan Hicks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the archaeofaunal remains from Skútustaðir, a middle to high-status farm in Mývatnssveit, Northern Iceland, to understand the experience of rural communities and their ecologies during Iceland’s transition from regulated colonial exchange to a capitalist economy during the 17^th through 19^th centuries. Archaeofaunal analysis is used to reconstruct changes in the ways that people herded, hunted, and fished, providing insights into how they managed their local environments for subsistence and novel contexts of exchange. In addition to archaeofaunal analysis, primary textual sources are explored to assess how the Skútustaðir household and its rural community mobilized long-term …

Hrísheimar: Fish Consumption Patterns, Wendi K. Coleman

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I examine the fish remain patterns at Hrísheimar, which have provided archaeologists with further evidence that inland sites such as those in the Mývatnssveit Region utilized both local freshwater and marine fish from the coastal regions as a part of their subsistence pattern.

Historical Ecology And Longitudinal Research Strategies Around Lake Mývatn Iceland, Thomas Mcgovern, George Hambrecht, Megan Hicks

Publications and Research

Historical Ecology has proven to be a very influential tool kit for thinking about complex human interactions with changing landscapes, climate, and other humans. It has also provided concrete and practical frameworks for carrying out sustained long- term place-based research projects that break through traditional periodization to look at the dialectical interaction of human economies and local and regional ecosystems through time. The “longitudinal perspective” pioneered by Carole Crumley’s work in Burgundy has proved to be a very effective tool for carrying out sustained multi-year, multi-investigator, and multi- generational investigations in landscapes around the globe. This paper presents an overview …

Climate Change And Threatened Heritage: Archaeology's Burden, Barry R. Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

Climate change and archaeology are currently intertwined, as more and more archaeologists around the world must deal with the effects it causes on the sites they work on. Threatened cultural resource sites are being swept away at alarming rates, and excavation projects are becoming more and more like salvage digs.

The Global Dance Network: Reykjaví­K, Iceland, Takes On New Moves, Emily Creek

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research is an exploration of the contemporary dance community in Reykjaví­­k, Iceland. The research questions guiding this thesis were founded in a desire to understand how the dance community in Reykjaví­k creates its own agency and meaning within the city of Reykjaví­­k, as well as how the dance community in Reykjaví­k takes imported dance knowledge, localizes it and creates local meaning. With this goal of understanding the ways the community navigates the wider global dance network from its location as a northern island, I utilize concepts from the anthropology of globalization as well as dance anthropology. I specifically employ …

Zooarchaeology Of The Scandinavian Settlements In Iceland And Greenland: Diverging Pathways, Thomas Mcgovern, Konrad Smairowski, George Hambrecht, Seth Brewington, Ramona Harrison, Megan Hicks, Frank J. Feeley, Brenda Prehal, James Woollett

Publications and Research

The Scandinavian Viking Age and Medieval settlements of Iceland and Greenland have been subject to zooarchaeological research for over a century, and have come to represent two classic cases of survival and collapse in the literature of long-term human ecodynamics. The work of the past two decades by multiple projects coordinated through the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) cooperative and by collaborating scholars has dramatically increased the available zooarchaeological evidence for economic organization of these two communities, their initial adaptation to different natural and social contexts, and their reaction to Late Medieval economic and climate change. This summary paper provides …

Egg On Hegranes: Geophysical Prospection, Coring, & Test Excavations—Report 2016, John M. Steinberg, Brian N. Damiata, Rita S. Shepard, Kathryn Anne Catlin, John W. Schoenfelder

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

This report describes the 2016 archaeological work at the farm of Egg is in the southernmost part of Hegranes, North Iceland.

Hegranesþing On Hegranes: Geophysical Prospection Interim Report 2013 – 2015, Brian N. Damiata, John M. Steinberg, John W. Schoenfelder, Douglas J. Bolender

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

Geophysical surveys were conducted at Hegranesþing on Hegranes in North Icelad during the summers of 2013 and 2015.

Was It For Walrus? Viking Age Settlement And Medieval Walrus Ivory Trade In Iceland And Greenland, Karen M. Frei, Ashley N. Coutu, Konrad Smiarowski, Ramona Harrison, Christian K. Madsen, Jette Arneborg, Robert Frei, Gardar Guðmundsson, Søren M. Sindbækg, James Woollett, Steven Hartman, Megan Hicks, Thomas Mcgovern

Publications and Research

Walrus-tusk ivory and walrus-hide rope were highly desired goods in Viking Age north-west Europe. New finds of walrus bone and ivory in early Viking Age contexts in Iceland are concentrated in the south-west, and suggest extensive exploitation of nearby walrus for meat, hide and ivory during the first century of settlement. In Greenland, archaeofauna suggest a very different specialized long-distance hunting of the much larger walrus populations in the Disko Bay area that brought mainly ivory to the settlement areas and eventually to European markets. New lead isotopic analysis of archaeological walrus ivory and bone from Greenland and Iceland offers …

Keflavík On Hegranes: Cemetery Excavation—Interim Report2015, Guðný Zoega, Douglas J. Bolender, Brian N. Damiata, John M. Steinberg

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

The summer of 2015 was the first of three planned years of excavations at the early Christian cemetery at farm Keflavík on Hegranes in the region of Skagafjörður, North Iceland. The excavation is the third phase of Skagfirska kirkjurannsóknin (Skagafjörður Church Project) and is a collective effort of the Skagafjörður Heritage Museum and the Fiske Center of the University of MassachusettsBoston. The collective project goes by the name Skagafjörður Church and Settlement Survey (SCASS). The excavation season started on the 6thof July and finished on the 14thof August. The first two weeks were spent cleaning the surface and removing a …

Expensive Errors Or Rational Choices: The Pioneer Fringe In Late Viking Age Iceland, Orri Vesteinsson, Mike Church, Andrew Dugmore, Thomas Mcgovern, Anthony Newton

Publications and Research

Just as the colonies established on the North Atlantic islands in the Viking Age were peripheral to Europe, so these islands had their own peripheral areas. In Iceland the highland margins have long been a focus of archaeological research and the prevailing view has been that highland settlement failed because people had made unrealistic assessments of carrying capacity. This paper presents a case study of the northern highland valley of Krókdalur and argues that the dating and pattern of settlement in that valley indicates that its settlers were keenly aware of its limitations. It also suggests explanatory frameworks that can …

Sorting Sheep And Goats In Medieval Iceland And Greenland Local Subsistence, Climate Change, Or World System Impacts?, Thomas Mcgovern, Ramona Harrison, Konrad Smiarowski

Publications and Research

Large archaeofaunal collections recovered from Viking Age and Medieval sites in Iceland and Greenland during intensive collaborative fieldwork over the past decade have demonstrated a diverging pattern in sheep and goat (caprine) management after ca. 1200 CE in the two Norse communities. Since Landnám (first settlement), flocks in both places contained a mixture of sheep and goats and survivorship profiles suggest a very mixed milk-meat-wool production strategy. By the late 13^th century Icelandic herds were nearly all sheep, and zooarchaeological evidence suggests an increasing focus on wool production. Greenlandic archaeofauna indicate that farmers maintained the old Viking Age pattern …

"Democracy" In A Virtual World: Eve Online's Council Of Stellar Management And The Power Of Influence, Jessica Ireland

Theses and Dissertations

Interest in virtual worlds has grown within academia and popular culture. Virtual worlds are persistent, technologically-mediated, social spaces. Academic literature focuses on issues such as identity, sociality, economics, and governance. However studies of governance focus on internal or external modes of control; less attention has been paid to institutions of governance that operate within both the virtual and real worlds.

In EVE Online, the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) represents a joint venture between developers and users to shape the direction of EVE's virtual society. As a group of elected representatives, the CSM represents societal interests to the game's developer, …

A Viking Age Political Economy From Soil Core Tephrochronology, Kathryn Anne Catlin

Graduate Masters Theses

Saga accounts describe Viking Age Iceland as an egalitarian society of independent household farms. By the medieval period, the stateless, agriculturally marginal society had become highly stratified in exploitative landlord-tenant relationships. Classical economists place the origin of differential wealth in unequal access to resources that are unevenly distributed across the landscape. This irregularity is manifested archaeologically as spatial variations in buried soil horizons, which are addressed through thousands of soil cores recorded across Langholt in support of the Skagafjörður Archaeological Settlement Survey. Soil accumulation rates, a proxy for land quality, are derived from tephrochronology and correlated with archaeological and historical …

Landscapes Of Settlement In Northern Iceland: Historical Ecology Of Human Impact And Climate Fluctuation On The Millennial Scale, Thomas H. Mcgovern, Orri Vesteinsson, Adolf Fridriksson, Mike Church, Ian Lawson, Ian A. Simpson, Arni Einarsson, Andy Dugmore, Gordon Cook, Sophia Perdikaris

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Early settlement in the North Atlantic produced complex interactions of culture and nature. The sustained program of interdisciplinary collaboration is intended to focus on ninth- to 13th-century sites and landscapes in the highland interior lake basin of M´yvatn in Iceland and to contribute a long-term perspective to larger issues of sustainable resource use, soil erosion, and the historical ecology of global change.

Fishing Booths And Fishing Strategies In Medieval Iceland: An Archaeofauna From The [Site] Of Akurvík, North-West Iceland, Colin Amundsen, Sophia Perdikaris, Thomas H. Mcgovern, Yekaterina Krivogorskaya, Matthew Brown, Konrad Smiarowski, Shaye Storm, Salena Modugno, Malgorzata Frik, Monica Koczela

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

Excavations in 1990 in North-West Iceland documented a stratified series of small turf structures and associated midden deposits at the eroding beach at Akurvík which date from the 11th–13th to the 15th–16th centuries AD. The site reflects a long series of small discontinuous occupations, probably associated with seasonal fishing. The shell sand matrix had allowed excellent organic preservation, and an archaeofauna of more than 100,000 identifiable fragments was recovered. The collections are dominated by fish, mainly Atlantic cod, but substantial amounts of whale bone suggest extensive exploitation of strandings or active whaling. This paper briefly summarizes the excavation results, presents …

Coping With Hard Times In Nw Iceland: Zooarchaeology, History, And Landscape Archaeology At Finnbogastaðir In The 18th Century, Ragnar Edvarsson, Sophia Perdikaris, Thomas H. Mcgovern, Noah Zagor

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

During a cooperative archaeological project in NW Iceland (Strandasýsla) involving the Icelandic National Museum and Hunter College of the City University of New York.1990 season, a small rescue excavation at the site of Finnbogastaðir generated a quantifiable collection of animal bones dating to the early modern period, mainly to the 18th century. The 18th c was a period of hardship in much of Iceland, with widespread tenantry, adverse climate, and degradation of many terrestrial landscapes posing severe challenges to poor farmers- perhaps most intensely in the Vestfirðir. The animal bone collection from Finnbogastaðir reflects a multi-stranded subsistence economy involving seals, …

Report Of Animal Bones From Selhagi, Mývatn District, Northern Iceland, Thomas H. Mcgovern, Sophia Perdikaris

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

In 2001 the FSl / NABO project Landscapes of Settlement in Northern Iceland collected animal bones from a stratified midden deposit associated with the abandoned site Selhagi on the property of the modern farm Haganes. Selhagi is located in the lushly vegetated lakeshore zone and its environmental setting presents a strong contrast with the eroded uplands to the S of the lake where the early sites at Sveigakot and Hrísheimur are under excavation. Close to both major migratory waterfowl nesting areas and some of the best trout fishing in Iceland, the site would appear to be optimally located for exploitation …