Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology

Featured Projects

Past and Present Research Projects at the Circumpolar Laboratory

The CLIP is the result of a five-year cooperative agreement with the National Park Service (NPS) to inventory and re-house the federally owned collections in the CPL. Led by Annalisa Heppner, M.A. the CLIP has completed a baseline inventory for the majority of the Cape Krusenstern, Onion Portage, Noatak River sites, and other small sites, totaling ca. 300,000 artifacts. The CLIP also created an MS Excel-based digital catalog from the ca. 30,000 catalog cards and notes for previously uncataloged objects and samples. On-going parts of the project include identifying, cataloging, and digitizing archival materials, rehousing artifacts according to the NPS museum handbook, and building relationships with diverse project stakeholders, including Native communities, Brown students, faculty, and staff, and the archaeological community.

Coming Into View blog documents the inventory project, with a combination of long-form posts about the history of the laboratory, the Giddings and Anderson legacy, updates on past projects, and of course what we’re finding during the inventory and shorter, photography-centric posts. 

Supported by the National Science Foundation, this archaeological research focuses on the development of trade networks in the North Atlantic and women's role in weaving cloth and participating in these trade networks for 1000 years. Past studies tell us that trade in the middle ages connected the North Atlantic islands to only one country. However, Research Associate Dr. Michèle Hayeur Smith's earlier research showed that nearly 1,000 years ago the Vikings traded and sold cloth in London and other European markets. This means that 900 years ago, women in places as far away as the islands of the North Atlantic made cloth for markets in distant places. The reason this is important is because it suggests that women's work was key to developing commodity markets that were the ancestors of today's market. By understanding how early international trade began in the North Atlantic and expanded as far as the Volga river, the research will contribute knowledge about the emergence of today's more complicated trade systems, how trade affects women's labor, and how people make decisions about what to make and what to trade.

NSF Award Number: 1733914
Initial Amendment Date: April 3, 2018
Latest Amendment Date: September 10, 2019

The Northern Women Arts Collaborative blog features the ongoing research of  Dr. Hayeur Smith, who has been collaborating with artists and other researchers to link academic research about traditional Northern women's work with contemporary artists and artisans. 

Far From Home is a project aimed at identifying Alaskan archaeological collections from 35+ years ago housed in the continental United States, with the goal of illustrating the reach of Alaskan interests outside of the state, and will explore the history of the Giddings and Anderson collections at the Haffenreffer Museum. 

NPS Project Manager Annalisa Heppner presented her findings at the 2019 Society for American Archaeology conference. 

Far From Home Poster, 2019