Resilience, Sustainability and Collapse in the North Atlantic

The North Atlantic has become recognized as a key research area in the circumpolar north. Long term Human Ecodynamics in the North Atlantic islands affected by human settlement impact, climate change, and early globalization and culture contact have become classic (and controversial) cases of “resilience and collapse” in the archaeology of global change literature. International, interdisciplinary collaboration coordinated by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO, www.nabohome.org ) during the International Polar Year (2007-11) and the NSF funded Comparative Island Ecodynamics Project (2012-15) has supported extensive new fieldwork across the region and innovative combinations of archaeology, documentary sources, high resolution multi-proxy climate reconstruction, modeling and data management initiatives are producing new insights. This session presents this new research from the Faroes, Orkney, Iceland and Greenland that report on new understanding of processes of Viking Age settlement, cases of both sustainable and ultimately unsustainable management of natural resources, impacts of sudden climate change after the Lombok eruption of 1257 with onset of summer sea ice ca. 1275-1300, the effects of growing trade and proto-world system impacts on local communities, and the integration of archaeology with use of heritage for place based sustainability education.