Shieling activity in the Norse Eastern Settlement : palaeoenvironment of the 'Mountain Farm', Vatnahverfi, Greenland

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The biogeographical status of Alnus crispa (Ait.) Pursch in sub-Arctic southern Greenland : Do pollen records indicate local populations during the past 1500 years?

The Leverhulme Trust is thanked for financial support. We also thank the referees for their constructive comments that helped to improve the paper.Peer reviewedPostprin

Competing hypotheses, ordination and pollen preservation : landscape impacts of Norse landnám in southern Greenland

We thank the Leverhulme Trust for financial support, and Gordon Cook and staff at SUERC for the provision of radiocarbon dates. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers and Shinya Sugita for valuable comments which improved the manuscript.Peer reviewedPostprin

A multiple profile approach to the palynological reconstruction of Norse landscapes in Greenland's Eastern Settlement

Acknowledgments The Leverhulme Trust is thanked for financial support. Gordon Cook provided radiocarbon dates. Thanks are also due to Andy McMullen for botanical identifications and assistance in the field, and to Sikuu Motzfeld for hospitality during fieldwork. We are also grateful to Emilie Gauthier, Mike Kaplan, Pete Langdon and Alan Gillespie for their comments.Peer reviewedPostprin

Stable carbon, nitrogen and sulphur isotope analysis of permafrost preserved human hair from rescue excavations (2009, 2010) at the precontact site of Nunalleq, Alaska

Acknowledgments This work was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/K006029/1) grant awarded to Rick Knecht, Kate Britton and Charlotta Hillerdal (Aberdeen); an AHRC-LabEx award (AH/N504543/1) to KB, RK, Keith Dobney (Liverpool) and Isabelle Sidéra (Nanterre); the Carnegie Trust to the Universities of Scotland (travel grant to KB); and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The onsite collection of samples was carried out by staff and students from the University of Aberdeen, volunteer excavators and the residents of Quinhagak. We had logistical and planning support for fieldwork by the Qanirtuuq Incorporated, Quinhagak, Alaska, and the people of Quinhagak, who we also thank for sampling permissions. Special thanks to Warren Jones and Qanirtuuq Incorporated (especially Michael Smith and Lynn Church), and to all Nunalleq project team members, in Aberdeen and at other institutions, particularly Charlotta Hillerdal and Edouard Masson-Maclean (Aberdeen) for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript, and also to Véronique Forbes, Ana Jorge, Carly Ameen and Ciara Mannion (Aberdeen) for their inputs. Thanks also to Michelle Alexander (York). Finally, thank you to Ian Scharlotta (Alberta) for inviting us to contribute to this special issue, to the Editor, and to three anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions and recommended changes to an earlier version of this manuscript greatly improved the paper.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

New horizons at L’Anse aux Meadows

The UNESCO World Heritage site of L’Anse aux Meadows (LAM) in northern Newfoundland is the only undisputed site of pre-1492 presence of Europeans in the Americas. In August 2018, we undertook fieldwork at LAM to sample the peat bog 30 m east of the Norse ruins for a multiproxy paleoenvironmental assessment of Norse settlement. Instead, we encountered a new cultural horizon. Here we report our fieldwork at this iconic site and a Bayesian analysis of legacy radiocarbon data, which nuance previous conclusions and suggest Norse activity at LAM may have endured for a century. In light of these findings, we reflect on how the cultural horizon, containing nonnative ecofacts, may relate to indigenous or Norse activities

A sub-centennial, Little Ice Age climate reconstruction using beetle subfossil data from Nunalleq, southwestern Alaska

This research was funded through an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant (AH/K006029/1) awarded to Drs. Rick Knecht, Charlotta Hillerdal and Kate Britton, the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 703322, and two NERC Radiocarbon Facility grants (NF/2015/1/6 and NF/2015/2/3) awarded to Drs. Rick Knecht and Paul Ledger. Our work at Nunalleq also benefitted from the support of the local community who made us all feel at home in Quinhagak and provided consistently warm hospitality. Logistical support from Warren Jones and Qanirtuuq Incorporated was also invaluable. VF would like to thank Anthony Davies for his invaluable help with the identification of Stenus species and for verifying her identification of other staphylinid taxa. Patrice Bouchard, Yves Bousquet, Henri Goulet and Aleš Smetana are also thanked for help provided with beetle identifications, as well as Professor Ian Foster, for kindly providing Pb210 dating support. Finally, we would like to thank Peter Jordan for the opportunity to publish in this special issue, as well as Philippe Ponel and an anonymous reviewer, whose comments helped us improve the original manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Dating and Digging Stratified Archaeology in Circumpolar North America : A View from Nunalleq, Southwestern Alaska

The results presented in this paper were funded by a NERC Radiocarbon Facility grant (NRCF 1917.0415), while the wider project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/K006029/1). The authors wish to thank all the members of the excavation crew from the 2014 field season for their hard work in the challenging weather conditions of southwest Alaska – without their attention to detail this study would not have been possible. Additional thanks are also due to Qanirtuuq Incorporated for logistical support and warm hospitality in Quinhagak. We also wish to thank Kevin Edwards and Kate Britton, who read an earlier draft of this paper, and three anonymous reviewers for highly constructive criticism that helped us to improve the final manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Stable carbon, nitrogen and sulphur isotope analysis of permafrost preserved human hair from rescue excavations (2009, 2010) at the precontact site of Nunalleq, Alaska

AbstractThe reconstruction of diet and subsistence strategies is integral to understanding hunter-gatherer societies in the past, and is particularly of interest in high latitude environments as they can illuminate human-environmental interactions and adaptations. Until recently, very little archaeological research had been undertaken on the Bering Sea coasts of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, and relatively little is known about precontact lifeways in this region. Here, we present stable carbon, nitrogen and sulphur isotope data from non-mortuary human hair excavated from Nunalleq (c. 1300CE–1750CE) – a precontact village site in Western Alaska. Now the focus of a major research project, excavations at Nunalleq began as a rescue excavation, as the site is eroding rapidly into the Bering Sea. Following an initial pilot study on cut strands representing a small number of individuals, a larger body of isotope data has now been generated from the first phase of the investigations of Nunalleq (2009, 2010). These new data, including sulphur isotope values, provide further evidence for the subsistence strategy at the site, including a mixed diet of marine and terrestrial foods (but likely dominated by salmonids). In addition, these new data from Nunalleq highlight some dietary variability amongst the inhabitants of the site. Analyses of additional longer hair strands suggest this variability may not be exclusively due to seasonal variation, and may evidence inter-personal dietary differences. Data from Nunalleq are compared to isotope data from previous studies of Thule-era and earlier Alaskan sites, and to isotope data from Thule sites in Canada and Greenland and the potential of ongoing and future research at the site is discussed, along with the implications for our understanding of Thule subsistence strategies and precontact lifeways on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta

A ‘near‐life experience’: lived experiences of spirituality from the perspective of people who have been subject to inpatient psychiatric care

Aims: To describe lived experiences of spirituality from the perspective of people who have been subject to inpatient psychiatric care and to interpret these experiences from an understanding of health as dialectical. Methods: After approval from a regional ethical board,eleven participants were recruited from two organisations for people with mental health problems. Participants were asked to narrate about spiritual experiences and occasions where such experiences had come close. The transcribed interviews were analysed by means of a phenomenological hermeneutical approach. Findings: A structural analysis of the text resulted in three themes; perceiving the presence of something extra mundane, making sense of reality and struggling for acceptance. The comprehensive understanding highlights spiritual experiences as going beyond religion, even though religious experiences appear as part of it. These experiences can indeed be a resource contributing to experiences of hope, connectedness, meaning and coherence in life. However, they can also give rise to doubt, anxiety and feelings of loneliness and hopelessness. Rather than understanding spiritual experiences as being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, we could approach spirituality as something that is always present in alternate and inter-related forms. Metaphorically, this could be understood as a ‘near-life experience’, summarising participants’experiences related to their struggle with issues related to suffering and health which are simultaneously present. Conclusions: If psychiatric nurses could approach this complexity and, without being judgemental, explore seemingly positive and negative experiences of spirituality as dialectically related to each other, rather than viewing them as either resources or problems, this could contribute to insiderness care and hopefully also support people who struggle with these experiences to seek help when needed