Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Page 43

THREE DECADES IN THE COLD AND WET: A CAREER IN NORTHERN ARCHAEOLOGY
interdisciplinary collaboration possible.
However, anniversaries and retrospec-
tives are moments to recognize both
teams and coaches and perhaps it is
appropriate to now both honor and annoy
McGovern while also focusing on the
collective achievements of North
Atlantic Archaeology and Paleoecology
over the past three decades.
McGovem eamed his BA at Columbia
College in 1972 with a joint degree in
Anthropology and Oriental Studies. He
went on to graduate school at Columbia
University, studying under Ralph and
Rose Solecki, Shirley Gorenstein, and
Bob Stigler, with early fieldwork in North
American sites ranging from late
Pleistocene to historic. He got his MA in
1973 from Columbia and an MPhil in
1975. He originally intended to do
Paleolithic archaeology in SW Asia and
worked with Andre Leroi-Gourhan and
the Soleckis on Middle and Upper
Paleolithic sites in France. He specialized
in lithic analysis and leamed Farsi with
hopes of joining projects in Iran.
Geopolitics and an inspiring course in
zooarchaeology taught by Dexter Perkins
and Pat Daley combined to divert him to
work in Britain and on animal bones. He
participated in the major urban excava-
tions at Winchester and York in the early
1970’s, and at York worked in James
Rackham’s cutting edge zooarchaeology
lab. Influenced by Ralph Solecki’s stories
of arctic archaeology and a growing
interest in both animal bones and the
Middle Ages, and with the kind help of
Ulrik and Jeppe Mohl, Knud Rosenlund,
and Tove Hatting at the University
Zoological Museum in Copenhagen, he
began work on animal bone collections
from Norse Greenland excavated by C.L.
Vebaek in the 1940’-60’s. With help
from Jorgen Meldgaard and Jens Rosing
and doctoral support from the American
Scandinavian Society Marshall Fund and
the US National Science Foundation he
was able to join the Danish-Greenlandic
Inuit-Norse Project of 1976-77 and partic-
ipate in the excavations of new stratified
animal bone collections from the Westem
Settlement. Together with the Vebaek
materials, these new collections provided
the basis for his doctoral thesis titled “The
Paleoeconomy of Norse Greenland:
Adaptation and Extinction in a Closely
Bounded Ecosystem” (Columbia 1979). In
1977-80 he worked with fellow Columbia
student Gerry Bigelow on Gerry’s doctor-
al project at the medieval físhing farm at
Sandwick South on Unst in Shetland. In
1981, 1982, and 1984 he was again work-
ing in Greenland’s Westem Settlement, in
1984 leading the Sandnes Archaeological
Rescue Project with Claus Andreasen and
Jette Ameborg with support from US
NSF, Denmark, and Greenland. In 1995
Tom also worked with Sophia Perdikaris,
Christian Keller, Paul Buckland, Ian
Simpson, and Reidar Bertelsen on her
doctoral project in arctic Norway. Since
2008 McGovem has also participated in
CUNY fieldwork led by Perdikaris in
Barbuda in the West Indies, retuming to
the prehistoric New World and the stone
age as well as working on 18th-19th centu-
ry sites with two of the current authors.
While McGovem has done fieldwork
in a range of periods and places, most of
his field time has been spent in Iceland,
beginning with collaborations on the
41