The Importance of Wild Animal Resources in Skagafjörður, North Iceland

Summary

In both past and present, pastoralism has been an integral part of life in Iceland. In fact, status is generally defined by how many cattle one can keep; however, wild resources are abundant in Iceland and are also used to supplement the diet. For much of Iceland’s history, wild resource use and access was heavily regulated through formal laws and social contracts that often favored elite landowners. Using case studies from Skagafjörður, North Iceland, this paper will explore the use of wild resources compared to domesticates. Preliminary zooarchaeological analyses of sites in the Hegranes region suggest that larger, wealthier farms used fewer and less varied wild resources than smaller, abandoned farms. This differential use of resources hints at the complex relationship between wealth and access to resources and, further, to the ways people would have thought about their use of wild animals—as a vital part of daily life or as something to be exploited occasionally. I argue that wild resources would have been vital to the smaller farms that could not support a large herd of domesticates, while larger farms likely had a very different relationship with the few wild resources they utilized.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Reimagining Human-Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16458