Extreme archaeological sites and their tourism: a conceptual model from historic American polar expeditions in Svalbard, Franz Josef Land and Northeast Greenland

Abstract

Differing levels of scholarly study, wide geographic dispersal, tourist visitation and protection by national cultural resource management regimes have left large gaps both in the scholarship and even the possibilities for scholarship at archaeological sites from the history of Arctic exploration. This article summarizes the history of seven American Arctic expeditions, the actual and potential archaeological remains they left behind, and the historic and contemporary use of these sites in Arctic tourism. It then proposes a set of field and cloud computing methodologies for the collection and networking of data to begin to fill the gaps in the records of these expeditions and in the process offer a model for an international scholarly architecture for the interactive study of polar archaeological sites tourism.