Episode 54

An Arctic Expedition - Ep 54

Amber's too cold, Anna's too hot, and we've both lost our dang minds! In an effort to think about something other than the summer heat, this week we're offering you a sampler platter of some of the amazing archaeology from the Arctic regions up north! Learn how people got to the Arctic, what some of them did when they got there, and what's happening to Arctic sites now in light of global warming. Also hyenas. Refreshing!

LinksThe Peopling of the Americas: Evidence for Multiple Models (Discover)Late Pleistocene exploration and settlement of the Americas by modern humans (Science)Beringia (National Parks Service)These First Americans Vanished Without a Trace — But Hints of Them Linger (LiveScience)The ancient people in the high-latitude Arctic had well-developed trade (EurekAlert)Do Canadian Carvings Depict Vikings? Removing Mammal Fat May Tell (LiveScience)How Did Prehistoric Hyenas Reach the Americas? Through the Arctic (Ha’aretz)As the Arctic Erodes, Archaeologists Are Racing to Protect Ancient Treasures (Smithsonian)The Unalaska Sea Ice Project (Boston University Zooarchaeology Laboratory)What Clam Thermometers Tell Us About Past Climates (Sapiens)Clamshells and Climate Change: What seal bones and clamshells teach us about past climate (The Brink)Digging for butter clams in Dutch Harbor, Alaska (Youtube)The Dirt Book Club!The earth is faster now: indigenous observations of Arctic environmental change, by Igor Krupnik and Dyanna JollyThe last imaginary place: a human history of the Arctic world, by Robert McGheeContactEmail the Dirt Podcast

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.