Of Fish and Plague: Death as Economic Opportunity at the Medieval Fishing Station of Gufuskálar, Iceland

Summary

The high morbidity (50% or greater) of Iceland’s Black Death in 1404 C.E. disrupted a rigidly hierarchical Icelandic social order and led to an inability to enforce social and legal constraints on Iceland’s labor classes. This newly untethered and mobile lower class searched for avenues for wealth creation previously unavailable. One avenue, in the century following Iceland’s Black Death, was through fishing and fish exports. During this period, previously tightly restricted fish exports flourished in trade between European merchants and numerous fishing and trading sites around Iceland’s coast. The 15th century fishing station of Gufuskálar on the northern coast of Iceland’s Snæfellsnes peninsula demonstrates large and anomalous concentrations of wealth and European trade goods. The site also has evidence of increasingly specialized marine resource utilization. Whether Gufuskálar’s resident fishermen were Icelandic or European, it is likely that this concentration of wealth was only possible through the temporary breakdown in Icelandic social hierarchy. Based on the zooarchaeological and preliminary artifactual data, this paper explores how social upheaval following Iceland’s Black Death is connected to intensive preindustrial fishing and a late medieval European dependence on Icelandic marine resources.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20289