Comparative Ecodynamics of North Atlantic Islands: A progress report

Summary

Support from US, Canadian, Scandinavian, and UK funding bodies 2007-16 has made possible a sustained multi-investigator multi-regional interdisciplinary series of investigations of the offshore islands of the North Atlantic (Faroes, Iceland, Greenland) coordinated by the NABO research cooperative. These islands were connected by Viking Age migrations from mainland Scandinavia and the British Isles, and the diverse fates of their human populations during the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods have become iconic examples of human impact on island ecosystems, unintended consequences of introductions, and disastrous impact of climate change. The case of Norse Greenland has become a controversial but influential example of a society that “chose to fail”. This presentation provides an overview of the new work in field and laboratory that is both expanding our understanding of the Norse North Atlantic and offering major challenges to established scenarios of resilience, human impact, and social collapse. “Island laboratories” in the North Atlantic continue to provide new perspectives on long term human ecodynamics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Model Environments: Human Ecodynamics on Islands

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