Dept. of Archaeology

Julia Brenan will be defending her PhD proposal, 'Toxic Inheritance: WWII Contamination in Labrador and its Implications for Heritage', on Wednesday, August 5th at 10:30am.

Julia outlines her research, "Contamination from human activity exists across Canada, and the northern regions hold many of the ~27,000 orphaned or abandoned mines, 63 DEW Line sites, and military infrastructure from WWII. Contemporary archaeology is only beginning to grapple with toxic contamination despite the many disciplines already confronting this issue. Filling this gap, my Ph.D. focuses on toxic contamination from WWII military installations in Labrador through mapping known contamination, synthesizing and defining contamination as an artifact, and investigating how dendrochemistry can be applied to archaeology and contamination. The research objectives will be accomplished through a literature review of contamination, spatially visualizing and aggregating contamination and heritage data, and utilizing dendrochemistry and pXRF to identify contamination. Combined, these methods will be intertwined to develop an interactive map of contamination and heritage, and integrate the archaeology of the recent past with knowledge of how toxins can be identified and conceptualized. Further, this research will empirically determine the validity of dendrochemistry for archaeological inquiry."

This will be a virtual proposal defence using the Webex platform, and the link to the Online Room is here: https://mun.webex.com/mun/j.php?MTID=m144f8debf21758093c46dc822689a458

Meeting number (access code): 132 005 3376
Meeting password: gKDDmShS488

Everyone is welcome to attend.