Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Page 44

SOPHIA PERDIKARIS, GEOROE HAMBRECHT AND RAMONA HARRISON
major Stóraborg excavations in the early
1980’s and continuing to the present. In the
late 1980’s he directed collaborative proj-
ects in the West Fjords (Finnbogastaðir,
Akurvík, Gjögur) and in the Northeast
(Svalbarð), research which has been since
taken further by his former doctoral stu-
dents Dr. Ragnar Edvardsson (Icelandic
State Heritage Agency) and Dr. Jim
Woollett (University of Laval). Since
1997 he has worked closely with
Icelandic and intemational teams work-
ing in Mývatnssveit and Þingeyjarsveit in
the long term “Landscapes of
Settlement” project that has brought over
a decade of sustained regional scale inter-
disciplinary effort to bear on what has
proven to be an exceptionally productive
research area (some of whose results will
be mentioned below). Since 1996 he has
participated in a joint field school with
the Archaeological Institute Iceland, the
University of Oslo, CUNY, and the
University of Aberdeen that began at
Hofstaðir in Mývatn and has since shifted
to Vatnsfjord in the West Fjords. In 2007-
10 McGovem served as principle investi-
gator of the NABO International Polar
Year program funded by US, Canadian,
and Danish sources that conducted coor-
dinated field projects in Shetland, Faroe
islands, Iceland, and Greenland for three
summers of intensive collaboration on a
multi-island scale (reports available at
www.nabohome.org).
McGovern has taught at Hunter
College of the City University of New
York since 1979, and has been a full pro-
fessor since 1987. Since 1979 he has also
mn the very productive zooarchaeology
/aboratory at Hunter, an International
Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ) rec-
ognized center that since 1999 has collab-
orated closely with the Brooklyn CUNY
Zooarchaeology Laboratory directed by
Perdikaris. Since 1993 he has served as
coordinator for the archaeology program
at the CUNY Doctoral Program in
Anthropology. He has been married to
Anne Osbome (now chair of the History
Department of Rider University) since
1978 and both his children Dan and Eliza
have participated in Icelandic and
Barbudan archaeology projects (and Dan
has also dug in Shetland and Greenland).
The NABO Cooperative
While McGovem has directed or assisted
multiple field projects and laboratory
analyses in the past three decades, his
major contribution to North Atlantic
scholarship and education has been in the
creation and promotion of the interna-
tional, interdisciplinary research cooper-
ative NABO (North Atlantic Biocultural
Organization, www.nabohome.org). This
regional research cooperative was for-
mally set up at an NSF supported work-
shop in 1992 at Hunter College, but the
idea was first fielded at a meeting at
Bowdoin College in 1988 hosted by
Gerry Bigelow and Susan Kaplan of the
Peary-Macmillan Arctic Center (Bigelow
1991). “NABO” of course means “neigh-
bor” in several Scandinavian languages,
and the underlying idea behind the group
has always been neighborly cooperation
and pooling of resources to allow us to
collectively accomplish ambitious large
scale and long term projects beyond the
capability of any single scholar, research
team, or national research effort. Since
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