Art Clausnitzer
I received my B.A. in history from the University of Southern Maine in 2008 and my M.A. in Archaeology from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2011. My master's thesis was written on a seventeenth-century brewhouse and bakery located in the 1621 Colony of Avalon in Ferryland, Newfoundland. My research interests are centered on material culture analysis, vernacular architecture, and historical environmental reconstruction and analysis. In pursuit of these interests I have participated in excavations in New England, Newfoundland, and Ireland.
For the last four years I have been heavily involved in the excavation and study of a multi-component historic fishing site on Smuttynose Island, located in the Isles of Shoals archipelago off of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I plan to incorporate the seventeenth-century component of this site into my PhD research, in which I wish to conduct a comparative study of seventeenth-century fishing sites in the Gulf of Maine and along the English Shore of Newfoundland, once two of the largest cod fisheries in the world. The quest for cod directly influenced the development of the New World, and through a combination of historical, archaeological, and environmental analysis I seek to explore and understand how the specific social, economic, political, and ecological factors in each region affected both the development of the fisheries and the course of European settlement in the New World.
