Team Bio

Our team has collaborated on projects across the North Atlantic since 2001, leading eventually to marriage. Individually we have worked in the Circumpolar region since 1981 (Kevin Smith) and 1994 (Michele Hayeur Smith). Our work together has recently involved XRF analyses of textiles across the North Atlantic, while my work includes detailed analyses of fire-starters from Icelandic Viking Age sites and the identification of a medieval scriptorium in Iceland from pigment stones.

Kevin Philbrook Smith

I am an archaeologist whose research has focused, for the past 33 years, on Viking Age and medieval exploration and settlement in Iceland and the North Atlantic. Initially I was interested in understanding the dynamic processes that led to the creation of a short-lived independent Icelandic state during the 13th century but my work in Iceland rapidly led to work on Viking Age iron production and farming. In 1997, I was asked whether I would be interested in analyzing the jasper fire-starters from L'Anse aux Meadows, on the basis of work I was doing in Iceland to trace the movement of people around its landscapes using these "matches" from the pockets of Iceland's Viking settlers. That led to a long-term project on jasper, collaborative work with Canadian colleagues, the development of a comparative collection of jasper and cherts from Newfoundland and the North Atlantic, expertise in X-Ray Fluorescence, and (naturally) to this project.

My current research projects in Iceland are focused on a Viking Age ritual site located deep within a lava cave in Iceland's forbidding interior, a chieftain's farm occupied from the 9th century to the present, and a 13th century fortified outpost inside another cave even farther into the interior. I have collaborated on, or led, projects in Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and Alaska, as well as in Scotland and on prehistoric sites around the continental United States, which have provided me with 45 years of experience in the analysis of stone tools.

I am also deputy director of Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, where I am in charge of daily operations, research, staff, students, diverse and research-ready collections, exhibition development, and more.

Michele Hayeur Smith

Michèle Hayeur Smith is an anthropological archaeologist with research interests in gender, textiles, dress, adornment and material culture studies. She has fieldwork experience in Iceland, and North America. Her doctoral research, conducted on jewellery and dress from Viking Age Icelandic burials, looked at items of dress for clues about the projection of social and cultural identity.
More recently she has been working in Iceland and the North Atlantic on research projects on gender and the production and circulation of textiles from the Viking Age to the early 19th century. NSF Arctic Social Sciences (Award no. 102316) “Rags to Riches: an Archaeological Study of Gender and Textiles in Iceland AD875-AD1800” examined curated archaeological textiles collections from roughly 34 Icelandic sites and has offered new insights into gender, textile production and trade in and out of Iceland, weaving technologies through time, as well as dress practices throughout the medieval period. This project has hopefully brought women’s lives and women’s roles in the Icelandic economy, household organization, regional politics, and culture into the forefront.
In 2013 She was awarded a second grant from the National Science Foundation (Award no. 1303898 ) “Weaving Islands of Cloth: Gender, Textiles and Trade across the North Atlantic, from the Viking Age to the Early Modern Period” expanding upon the previous grant and carrying a comparative, 1000-year examination of textiles as primary evidence for women’s labor and roles in some of the Norse colonies that expanded from Scandinavia across the North Atlantic in the 9th century AD and developed, over the following millennium, into the modern nations of Scotland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland.