Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Page 45

THREE DECADES IN THE COLD AND WET: A CAREER IN NORTHERN ARCHAEOLOGY
1993 NABO has supported field projects
in Greenland, Northem Norway, the Faroe
Islands, the Shetland Islands, Orkney,
mainland Scotland, Barbuda/Antigua, and
Iceland with personnel, expertise, and
fínancial contributions. NABO has
worked to pool resources and rationalize
logistics, with multiple joint-purchase four
wheel drive vehicles still on the road
(Land Rovers a favorite) and substantial
stocks of joint use fíeld gear stockpiled for
multiple project use on several islands.
NABO has facilitated purchase and shar-
ing of expensive kit among field projects
(resistivity meters, mapping GPS, flota-
tion systems, cameras) as well as the con-
sumable bags, tags, and cans of spam that
keep projects mnning in the field.
Besides such practical logistical col-
laborations NABO has also worked to
promote comparability in basic collec-
tion, analysis, and reporting of our data
sets. Given the diverse national and disci-
plinary traditions represented by North
Atlantic scholarship, achieving such
basic comparability is no small task, and
NABO working groups stmggled to pro-
duce the NABONE zooarchaeology
recording and data management stmcture
and associated digital osteology manuals.
The resulting NABONE 9.0 and FISH-
BONE 1.1 digital products are available
as free downloads from the NABO web-
site and full CD teaching packages with
additional materials and sample data sets
have been mailed gratis to 379 addresses
worldwide. NABO works as an ICAZ
working group íhttp://www.alexandri-
aarchive.org/icaz/worknabo.html and is
now collaborating with the Icelandic
Natural History Institute and the EU
STERNA program in producing a com-
parable bird osteology digital product
Ihttp://www.sterna-net.euA. The multi-
year NABO international fíeld school
and the many inter-connected field proj-
ects across the region which regularly
swap students and staff have promoted
the adoption and spread of a basic set of
excavation and recording standards
largely derived from the Archaeological
Institute Iceland fíeld manual (heavily
modified from a Museum of the City of
London model, Lucas 2003). At present
the region is fortunate to have a large
body of comparably trained active
younger workers all now treating com-
mon standards and comparable methods
as a part of normal research rather than a
“desirable but impossible” goal, and
NABO has played a signifícant role in
this accomplishment. NABO has held 22
workshops and conferences since 1992
that have facilitated professional net-
working as well as comparability, and
have produced several major conference
publications (Bigelow 1991, Morris &
Rackham 1992, Ogilvie & Jónsson 2001,
Housley & Coles 2004, Gronnow et al.
2005), and NABO monographs (Lucas
2009, Morris et al. 1995, Dockrill et al.
2007). Nearly a hundred MA, MSc, and
PhD theses have been aided by the
NABO cooperative and McGovern has
served on doctoral committees for sever-
al dozen current PhD’s, including ours.
Zooarchaeology is McGovem’s spe-
cialty, and zooarchaeology has clearly
made its own powerful contribution to
Icelandic and North Atlantic archaeology
in the past three decades (McGovern et
al. 2006; Perdikaris and McGovern;
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