Draft:Michèle Hayeur Smith

Michèle Hayeur Smith is an anthropological archaeologist and adjunct faculty member at Bridgewater State University, Department of Anthropology. Her research interests include gender, textiles, dress, adornment and material culture studies. Her field work has been primarily situated in North Atlantic islands and countries, especially Iceland. Hayeur Smith also identifies as an artist in textile weaving.

Education
Hayeur Smith's interest in fabrics was inspired by her mother, an anthropologist who collected fabrics from around the world. Hayeur Smith received a fashion degree in Paris while in her 20s. In the 1990s, she was a Ph.D. student at the University of Glasgow, where her work focused on Viking women's dress and ornamentation. Her thesis, titled A social analysis of Viking jewellery from Iceland, was submitted to the Department of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow in 2003.

Hayeur Smith continues to develop as a visual artist, having taught herself to work on a warp-weighted loom.

Research interests
After completing her Ph.D., Hayeur Smith decided to focus on "uncover(ing) the lives of the ordinary women who stood weaving at their looms." Her primary research interests include gender, textiles, dress, adornment and material culture studies. Hayeur Smith's field work has been carried out primarily in North Atlantic locations, especially Iceland. Her research focuses on fabric and ornamentation from the Viking Age to the early 19th century, and has generated "new insights into gender, textile production and trade in and out of Iceland, ... [and] brought women’s lives and women’s roles in the Icelandic economy, household organization, regional politics, and culture into the forefront."

Prizes and awards
In 2010, Hayeur Smith was awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) Arctic Social Sciences (Award no. 102316) “Rags to Riches: an Archaeological Study of Gender and Textiles in Iceland AD875-AD1800” This project resulted in the curation of archaeological textiles collections from approximately 34 Icelandic sites.

In 2013, she was awarded a second grant from the NSF (Award no. 1303898 ) “Weaving Islands of Cloth: Gender, Textiles and Trade across the North Atlantic, from the Viking Age to the Early Modern Period.” With this grant, her research expanded upon the previous grant. The result was a "1000-year examination of textiles as primary evidence for women’s labour 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."

In 2018, Hayeur Smith was awarded a third grant from the National Science Foundation for her three-year project: Archaeological Investigation of the Eastern North Atlantic Trade and Globalizing Economic Systems. This project was designed to provide a perspective on trade, women, and the early globalized economies in the North. The project's aim is to highlight the impact of women’s work on global trade.

Selected publications

 * Hayeur Smith, M. (2004).  Draupnir’s Sweat and Mardöll’s Tears: An Archaeology of Jewelry, Gender, and Identity in Viking Age Iceland. British Archaeological Reports, John and Erica Hedges, Ltd. & Archaeopress, Oxford.
 * Hayeur Smith, M. (2017) Ethnicity (in book: A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age; DOI:10.5040/9781474206396.ch-007
 * Smith, Michèle Hayeur; Smith, Kevin P.; Nilsen, Gørill (August 2018). "Journal of Archaeological Science" (PDF). Dorset, Norse, or Thule? Technological Transfers, Marine Mammal Contamination, and AMS Dating of Spun Yarn and Textiles from the Eastern Canadian Arctic. Elsevier. doi:10.1016/J.JAS.2018.06.005. hdl:10037/14501. S2CID 52035803.
 * Hayeur Smith, M. (2019). Rumpelstiltsken’s feat: cloth and German trade with Iceland. AmS-Skrifter 27, 107–120,  Stavanger, ISSN 0800-0816, ISBN 978-82-7760-183-0 .I (full text available)
 * Hayeur Smith, M. (2020). The Valkyries' loom: The archaeology of cloth production and female power in the North Atlantic. Gainesville, FL.