Kevin P. Smith

• Anthropology/Archaeology, University of Michigan
• Research Associate at Smithsonian Institution

This chapter, an appendix within "Reykholt: The Church Excavations" (Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir, ed.), describes the largest and most diverse assemblage of lithic objects known from archaeological excavations in Iceland. This assemblage was recovered from floor and fill deposits associated with the medieval and post-medieval churches at the elite ce...

Yarn and textiles recovered from prehistoric Dorset and Thule culture sites in the Eastern Canadian Arctic have raised questions about the extent and timing of indigenous and Norse interaction in the New World, whether the yarn represents technological transfers between Greenland's Norse settlers and the Dorset, or whether these Indigenous Arctic g...

Surtshellir, a 1600-m-long lava cave in the interior of Iceland, contains a unique Viking Age archaeological site located nearly 300 m from its entrance and more than 10 m below the surface of the Hallmundarhraun lava field. Since the 1750s, the site has been interpreted as an outlaw shelter, yet in the 12th-13th centuries it was associated with ac...

Fragments of orpiment (As2S3) from a Viking Age structure inside Iceland’s Surtshellir cave represent the farthest-known occurrence of this rare mineral from sources known to have been exploited during the Early Middle Ages. Actual fragments of orpiment (from Latin auripigmentum, golden pigment) are only documented in late first millennium AD north...

Hallmundarhellir is one of eight caves within western Iceland’s Hallmundarhraun lava field known to contain archaeological remains. The site was discovered in 1956 and was briefly investigated by Gísli Gestsson in 1958. In July 2017 we mapped Hallmundarhellir; took samples for radiocarbon dating, aDNA analysis, and zooarchaeological evaluation; and...

Short article on pp. 45-46 of the Smithsonian Institution's Arctic Studies Center's Newsletter for 2024 on a project to calibrate and systematize more than 400 radiocarbon dates obtained over the course of 50 years from archaeological sites in Labrador and Newfoundland by researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and their colleagues. The report...

Arctic Studies Center Newsletter 30 (2022): 42-46

Fragments of orpiment (As2S3) from a Viking Age structure inside Iceland’s Surtshellir cave represent the farthest-known occurrence of this rare mineral from sources known to have been exploited during the Early Middle Ages. Actual fragments of orpiment (from Latin auripigmentum, golden pigment) are only documented in late first millennium AD north...

Curriculum Vitae

This is the preprint version of an article published on 1 December 2022 in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Reports, on the multi-instrumental analysis and identification of twelve minuscule fragments of orpiment, a rare arsenic sulfide pigment, from the floor of a Viking Age ritual structure located 300 meters into the massive lava cave Surt...

Hallmundarhellir is one of eight caves within western Iceland's Hallmundarhraun lava field that are known to contain archaeological remains. It was discovered in 1956 by Stefán Kalmansson of Kalmanstunga and was briefly investigated in 1958 by Gísli Gestsson, who interpreted it as a Viking Age outlaw shelter and perhaps the model for Hallmundur's l...

Hallmundarhellir is one of eight caves within western Iceland’s Hallmundarhraun lava field that are known to contain archaeological remains. It was discovered in 1956 by Stefán Kalmansson of Kalmanstunga and was briefly investigated in 1958 by Gísli Gestsson, who interpreted it as a Viking Age outlaw shelter and perhaps the model for Hallmundur’s l...

Research on North Atlantic societies’ transitions from medieval to early modern cultures has recently become more theoretically engaged and informed. In Iceland, historical research has framed the most important processes in this transition as changes in religious affiliation and in the trading partners that linked Iceland to continental European p...

Zooarchaeological report of animal bones and teeth from Hallmundarhellir cave in west Iceland.

In 1938, a woman’s burial was uncovered by road builders at Ketilsstaðir in north-eastern Iceland. Recently, her physical remains and associated funerary goods were re-examined by an international, interdisciplinary team and formed the basis for an exhibition at the National Museum of Iceland in 2015. This paper focuses on the items of dress that a...

Contexts is the Annual Report of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University, providing short reports on current and on-going research, overviews of programs and grants, and student / faculty engagement with the Museum, its collections, and its exhibitions and public programs. Editor: Kevin P. Smith, Brown University, Haffenreffer...

This poster examines the burned bones recovered from the floor of a Viking Age boat-shaped, stone-built enclosure approximately 275 meters into the dark zone of Surtshellir cave in the western interior of Iceland. The central question of the research, spearheaded by Véronique Marengère, is whether the burned bones from the site represent remains fr...

Annual report of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, highlighting research, collections acquired, grants and teaching done through the museum and with its collections. (Kevin P. Smith editor and author, along with 34 additional authors)

Arctic Horizons is a multi–institution collaboration that provides the Arctic social science research community with an opportunity to reassess goals, potentials, and needs within the diverse disciplinary and transdisciplinary currents of social science research across the circumpolar North. The Arctic social science research community is at a mome...

Annual report and newsletter of research, exhibitions, student projects, grants, and outreach through Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology for the 2016 Academic Year. Editor: Kevin Smith. Contributions from students, faculty, staff, and researchers affiliated with the HMA and its projects.

In 1921, during Poul Nørlund’s excavation at the Norse farm Herjolfsnes, Greenland, a tall hat was recovered from the burial grounds surrounding the farm’s church, where a substantial collection of medieval garments had been recovered. This unusual hat came to symbolize not only the end of the Greenland Norse colony but also its enduring cultural l...

In recent decades, archaeological discourse has expanded beyond earlier paradigms concerned primarily with chronology, typology, and function. Archaeologies of gender, the body, the household, childhood, ritual, magic, and sexuality, among others, have merged with more traditional interests in social processes, cultural evolution, adaptation, subsi...

L'Anse aux Meadows is the only documented Viking Age Norse site in North America. Its architecture, evidence of iron smelting, artifacts of Norse manufacture and radiocarbon dates suggest short-term site use as an exploration base around AD 1000-1050. Butternut (Juglans cinerea) seeds from deposits adjacent to the halls suggest southward exploratio...

NOTE: FOR A COPY OF THIS PAPER PLEASE CONTACT ME THROUGH RESEARCHGATE. THIS PAPER WAS BASED ON PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATIONS AT THE SITE IN 2001. SUBSEQUENT WORK AT THE SITE IN 2012-2013 REQUIRED US TO COMPLETELY CHANGE THE INTERPRETATIONS PRESENTED IN THIS PAPER. OUR NEW UNDERSTANDING OF SURTSHELLIR IS PRESENTED IN SMITH, ÓLAFSSON, AND PALSDÓTTIR, 2...

Less than 1% of the forests found by Iceland’s 9th century Norse colonists remain today. Recently, a number of academic and popular works have used Norse land-use strategies and Icelandic deforestation as exemplars of unsustainable practices leading to social and environmental collapse. Yet, other research characterizes early Norse land-use strateg...

In 2008, a small team from Brown University conducted one week of exploratory archaeological and geophysical investigations at Gilsbakki, a previously unexcavated elite farm site in western Iceland, known from the Icelandic Sagas and thought to have been occupied from the 10th century to the present. The primary goals of these initial investigation...

NOTE: FOR A COPY OF THIS PAPER PLEASE CONTACT ME THROUGH RESEARCHGATE. THIS PAPER WAS BASED ON PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATIONS AT THE SITE IN 2001. SUBSEQUENT WORK AT THE SITE IN 2012-2013 REQUIRED US TO COMPLETELY CHANGE THE INTERPRETATIONS PRESENTED IN THIS PAPER. OUR NEW UNDERSTANDING OF SURTSHELLIR IS PRESENTED IN SMITH, ÓLAFSSON, AND PALSDÓTTIR, 20...

Between AD II75 and 1250 medieval lceland transformed itselffrom a network of decentralized simple chiefdoms into a unified proto-state. Uniquely, a vast corpus of vernacular writing-much wrilten by the chieftains themselves-describes actors' ideologies, histories, motivations, and understandings of the processes involved. Archaeological data provi...

Brief discussion of Instrumental Neutron Activation Analyses of a small group of jasper fire-starter fragments from the Norse/Viking Age exploration base at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. The analyses suggest that most of these objects – the matches in the pockets of the Vikings – were brought to the site by Norse explorers from their homelands...

The Early Holocene period remains the least understood segment of lower Great Lakes prehistory. This paper provides a descriptive and synthetic catalogue of curated Early and Middle Archaic projectile points from the Niãgãra Frontier of westem New York and adjacent Ontario, documents their diversity and diagnostic attributes, and discusses their di...

The Norse settlement of Iceland established a viable colony on one of the world's last major uninhabited land masses. The vast corpus of indigenous Icelandic traditions about the country's settlement makes it tempting to view this as one of the best case studies of island colonization by a pre‐state society. Archaeological research in some ways sup...

Háls, located today on the lands of the farm Kollslækur in Hálsasveit, Borgarfjarðarsýsla, western Iceland, is an archaeological site representing the ruins of a small, independent medieval farm, founded ca. AD 1000 and known to have been occupied (or occupiable) at least until 1258, overlying a Viking Age iron production complex that was in operat...

While thc basic structure of responses to scarcity is constrained by the nature of those stresses which coping mechanisms must mediate to be effective, the implementation of coping strategies is predicated on the sociocultural context, which defìnes the range of organisational and technological options for mediating periods of subsistence stress. I...

This report describes archaeological and documentary investigations undertaken in 1989 at the site of Háls, on the farm Kollslækur in Hálsasveit, Borgarfjarðarsýsla, western Iceland. Limited historical documentation suggested that Háls was a small, independent farm worth 20 hundrað when its tithe was assessed in 1258, and that it had been abandon...