Michèle Hayeur Smith, a research associate at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University, has been awarded a supplement to the grant, Weaving Islands of Cloth: Gender, Textiles, and Trade across the North Atlantic from the Viking Age to the Early Modern Period (NSF # 1303898). This grant was originally awarded in August, 2013, funded by the National Science Foundation, Arctic Social Sciences. This latest award will support her continued research on women’s roles in the production and trade of cloth across the North Atlantic from the Viking Age until the early 1800s. The total amount of this supplement is $238,590, bringing the total amount received for "Weaving Islands of Cloth” to $840,689.

Dr. Hayeur Smith will continue work on archaeological textiles from across the North Atlantic but will focus predominantly on Greenlandic collections, and look at some "possible" Norse textile material found on Dorset sites from the Canadian High Arctic. According to Dr. Hayeur Smith, “this last portion is a bit controversial, but if the select items prove to be Norse then this does have significant impacts for the interpretation of Norse/ Inuit contact.”

Weaving Islands of Cloth, Textiles and Trade Across the North Atlantic from the Viking Age to the Early Modern Period expands upon a successful, 3-year (2010-2013) collections-based archaeological project also funded by NSF’s Arctic Social Sciences program. That project, Rags to Riches – An Archaeological Study of Textiles and Gender in Iceland AD 874 -1800 ($485,000), analyzed archaeological textile assemblages from 34 Icelandic sites spanning 1,000 years and generated new information on the roles of men and women in Icelandic society, the structure of Viking Age and medieval textile production, the role of Icelandic textiles and women in international trade and Iceland’s economy, creative approaches developed by Icelandic women as sustainable responses to climate change during the Little Ice Age, and changes through time in Icelandic dress.

Dr. Hayeur Smith says that studying Icelandic textiles and textiles from the North Atlantic is not just about describing cloth or counting threads. Rather, she says, “these textiles encode important information about society, cultural interaction and adaptation. They are eloquent historical texts in their own right, providing new insights into cultural change, women’s creative and productive roles, climate change, and trade across a vast expanse of time and space.”