Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Page 46

SOPHIA PERDIKARIS, GEORGE HAMBRECHT AND RAMONA HARRISON
McGovem 1980; McGovem, Perdikaris,
and Tinsley 2001; Krivogorskaya,
Perdikaris, and McGovem; McGovem et
al. 1988; Amorosi et al. 1996; McGovem
1981). Perhaps ironically, the greatest
achievement of the NABO zooarchaeo-
logical effort in the North Atlantic may
have been to fully submerge zooarchae-
ology into the broader goals of large
multi-disciplinary teams involving histo-
rians, archaeobotanists, geoarchaeolo-
gists, geographers, ethnographers,
modelers and data management experts
as well as “normal” archaeologists. By
conducting multi-year multi-investigator
projects with a sustained focus on change
through time in a common research area
(Carole Crumley’s “Longitudinal
Strategy” 1994), NABO teams have reg-
ularly achieved fully interdisciplinary
interactive collaboration on common
large scale research problems rather than
the more common multi-disciplinary par-
allel-play collaboration that tends to pro-
duce monographs with non-interacting
chapters, scattered results, and no com-
mon focus. Tom McGovem’s vision has
been at the center of this effort. Through
sheer force of good will, boundless ener-
gy and an unwillingness to work alone
Tom has helped create long-term collab-
orative networks, that cross cut not only
nationality (it is comparatively easy to
get archaeologists or palynologists to see
common ground whatever their native
language) but the more difficult discipli-
nary barriers (especially between the
hard sciences and humanities). Like all
good research, this approach has often
produced more questions than answers.
Rather than being finite and deterministic
about research results, members of this
initiative are open to discussion, critical
questioning of results and are aware of
the limitations and the potentials of their
data. This flexibility allows for revisiting
issues, sites, problems, data, analysis,
questioning results, and driving the
research towards improved interpretations.
Probably the most obvious sign of this
reflexively interdisciplinary and collabo-
rative approach is that NABO papers and
articles almost never have only one
author. They are always written by the
full team that produced the data, invari-
ably including graduate students and jun-
ior scholars in lead positions. Possibly
the best example of this in print is a
recent American Anthropologist NABO
article in a solicited group of papers on
the archaeology of global change, which
had an author list of 18 scholars
(McGovem et al. 2007). This article went
on to win the American Anthropological
Association’s prestigious Gordon R.
Willey Award in 2010 for best interdisci-
plinary archaeological publication in the
past three years.
Human Ecodynamics in
Mývatnssveit: Some Surprises
Sustained longitudinal projects and dedi-
cation to long-term regional analysis that
can produce full cross disciplinary inter-
action have become a characteristic
NABO approach in many islands and
regions, but nowhere has this approach
been more sustained than in
Mývatnssveit in North Iceland. Here a
series of interconnected projects have
provided some surprising new perspec-
tives on long term human-environment
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