Veronique Forbes

I am an archaeologist trained at Université Laval in Quebec City (Canada) and the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, UK) whose research centres on the archaeology and ecology of northern communities’ changing relationships with subarctic and arctic environments. My methodological expertise is in environmental archaeology, and I specialize in the analysis of insect remains and the excavation of sod/turf-built dwellings. This allows me to examine past lifeways and living conditions as well as long-term human-mediated landscape and biodiversity change.

I have been a faculty member of the Department of Archaeology at Memorial University (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada) since January 2018, which is when I began to work on the UNESCO World Heritage site of L’Anse aux Meadows. What begun as a small-scale study, intended to examine the ‘palaeoecological footprint’ of Norse the peoples who once lived at the site, developed into a broader and longer-term project when our team identified a previously unknown cultural layer buried in a bog at the site.

My three-months visit as an International Visiting Researcher at WiVA coincides with the final year of the research project entitled Biocultural and Archaeological Legacies at L’Anse aux Meadows, which I am co-leading with Paul Ledger and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The research environment and multidisciplinary expertise and interests of the WiVA community is the ideal place where to share findings from this work, exchange ideas, and receive feedback and advice on how to approach the heritage and cultural landscapes of L’Anse aux Meadows. The site, which sits at the westernmost reaches of the Viking diaspora, represents the earliest archaeological evidence for a European presence on lands that are and have long been homes to First Nations, Paleo-Inuit and Inuit.

During my time in Uppsala, I have given a public lecture at Gamla Uppsala Museum. I will also be delivering a workshop inviting WiVA colleagues to help us ‘dig deeper’ into the field records (stratigraphic profiles, Harris matrices, maps and photographs) we have generated thus far from our peatland excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows. Lectures, seminars and discussions with colleagues, as well as site and museum visits in Sweden, Norway, northern Germany and Denmark, have greatly deepened my understanding of the lives and homelands of the peoples who voyaged across the North Atlantic all the way to northern Newfoundland about a millennium ago, and it is my hope to keep learning and nurturing these collaborations.