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Permafrost Digging

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

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State of Knowledge and Current Debates

Introduction

For archaeological sites and materials, especially the most ancient ones, permafrost conditions have a dualistic character. On the one hand, they promote preservation of non-durable artifacts that would have been seriously damaged or completely destroyed outside the permafrost context. Temperatures below 0 °C, fluctuating little over time, and anaerobic conditions allow for preservation of various substances and organic remains, like biological materials from archaeological excavations, including aDNA and sedDNA (Hollesen et al. 2018).

However, even in permafrost conditions, artifacts may be destroyed as a result of the growth of subsurface ice and cryoturbation, due to mechanic (breaking and splitting) and biogeochemical impacts (Pitulko 2007). The latter has a special effect on preservation of artifacts made of osseous materials, archaeological wood, and other organic matter in cases when artifacts and other evidence of past human...

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    1. Paleolithic Department, Institute for the History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

      Vladimir V. Pitulko

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    1. Departament d’Humanitats, ICREA/Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

      Sandra Montón-Subías

    2. Department of Archaeology, Durham University, Durham, UK

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    Pitulko, V.V. (2020). Permafrost Digging. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_1513

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