A Movement at the Margins: An Icelandic Rural Transformation at the Edge of the 19th Century Atlantic World

Summary

In the early modern Atlantic World, core/periphery mercantile economics ascribed a marginal place for Iceland. The island's role in trade involved the production of low-cost bulk goods destined for markets mostly via Denmark into the 19th century. The focal area of this paper, the rural and upland Mývatn region, was in some ways socially and ecologically marginal even within Iceland. The growing environment was affected by unpredictable cold weather while volatile erosion zones hemmed local grazing land and hayfields. Although the community was home to two small rural municipal centers, it was distant from coastal trading points. Through interdisciplinary archaeology, environmental investigation, and documentary evidence, this paper investigates and describes how people in Mývatn managed ecological productivity and economic engagement at a periphery. We find that their significant efforts to secure abundance from marginal places was inseparable from social transformations through which the community ultimately assumed an influential role in changing the conditions of regional and national trade. This integrated social and ecological approach contributes to understandings of marginality as not an essential property of landscapes and societies, but one that is actively produced and contested through relations at many scales.

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): 20915