Fellows » Current Fellows » IHUM Fellow: Tara Carter, PhD
Tara Carter received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego (2010) and specializes in historical archaeology and the application of social network theory. As an archaeologist, Tara’s research has focused on the Norse Viking Age colonization of Iceland, with a particular interest the culture’s series of striking social transformations that began with an independent society ruled by chieftains, to one ruled by state-level institutions, and later to one subjugated under the rule of foreign kings. To understand these cultural shifts, she has examined the political economy of Iceland through a global perspective, rather than a solely localized lens as it is has often been viewed, demonstrating that the crucial question of state formation must be viewed along several different structural, spatial, and temporal scales that can better gauge the economic and political pulse of transitional societies. Applying these data to social network models, Tara has proposed that the economy of Viking Age Iceland was shaped by a kind of world system, what she calls the Norse Economic Territory (NET), a system motivated by micro-scale economic and political gain at home, but facilitated by the overseas macro-scale trade of luxury and staple goods that connected Iceland to societies throughout Western Europe and the Middle East. Tara is in the process of turning her dissertation into a book that will focus on how the Icelandic case study suggests that we must reconsider many assumptions we hold about the nature of ancient economies in general, and about the political and economic dynamics of the North Atlantic in particular.
While at UCSD, Tara taught several courses including Making of the Modern World, and the Introduction to Anthropological Archaeology.
When not teaching or excavating in the freezing cold setting that is ICE-land, Tara enjoys running, hiking, and daydreaming about the day she can have a dog.