Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Page 10

GAVIN LUCAS
example of the kind of current
zooarchaeological research that is being
conducted in Iceland, namely her work on
faunal assemblages from a small farm in
the north-east of Iceland.
The fínal two articles in this issue
leave the celebratory section and offer
two contrasting examples of recent
archaeological research. The first, by
Véronique Forbes and colleagues, retains
the environmental science theme of
Harrison’s paper, but shifts from animal
bones to bugs. Through an examination of
insect remains from recent excavations of
the post-medieval farm of Vatnsfjörður in
the north-west of Iceland, Forbes et al.
explore the living conditions of everyday
life on a turf farm in the nineteenth and
early twentieth century. From the small-
scale world of insects to the large canvass
of the landscape, the final paper zooms out
to outline the history and potential future
of aerial photography and satellite
imagery for Icelandic archaeology. In
their article, Oscar Aldred, Elín Ósk
Hreiðarsdóttir and Óskar Gísli
Sveinbjamarson offer a long overdue and
much needed synthesis of this important
resource and tool for archaeological
survey and site mapping in Iceland.
At a time when the current situation of
archaeology in Iceland is under threat
from financial cutbacks and the effects of
the crisis of 2008 are still present - if
indeed not rather magnified - it becomes
even more important to maintain a
published fomm for archaeological
research in this country. So much vitally
significant work has been conducted in the
past decade that it is imperative that
channels of dissemination remain open,
otherwise there is the danger that such
work will have all been to no purpose. We
hope that this joumal will be seen as one
such channel, especially to the
intemational community, and help, in
however small a way, as a reminder of
such important work.
J
8