Coring in the ash midden outside the turf house museum
Sigríður Sigurðardóttir, Director of the Skagafjörður Heritage Museum will give a Brown Bag talk on Tuesday, April 12 at 12:30 t UMass Boston in McCormack 1/503. The talk is titled “From Text to Trowel: how a local rural heritage museum thrives in the 21st century.”
The talk will describe the diverse portfolio of activities that the Skagafjörður Heritage Museum conducts that make it a vibrant center of cultural life for a valley in northern Iceland that has 6000 people and is located 60 miles south of the artic circle. The Museum mixes local and international projects with traditional and cutting edge approaches to work in areas that require knowledge of hard science and local legend. The museum embraces 40,000 or so tourists every year but has a café frequented by locals. The Museum also offers international courses that take advantage of the regional knowledge of the traditional craft of turf house building. Finally, she will describe how the small archaeological department has become one of the largest recipients of Icelandic government grants.
The Skagafjörður Heritage Museum is UMass Boston’s Partner in the National Science Foundation funded Skagafjörður Church and Settlement Survey (SCASS). That project will run for 3 years and has received well over $500,000 in grants.
