Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Qupperneq 47

Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Qupperneq 47
THREE DECADES IN THE COLD AND WET: A CAREER IN NORTHERN ARCHAEOLOGY interactions, or “human ecodynamics”, many of which contradict or modify the picture we provided Jared Diamond when he was doing his research for Collapse nearly a decade ago. This earli- er view saw humans in Iceland as destructive agents of widespread envi- ronmental change (especially deforesta- tion and soil erosion), who introduced a farming economy and an associated set of cultural expectations formed in less vul- nerable ecosystems in Norway or Britain that had unexpectedly adverse impacts in Iceland. Early Icelandic settlers were per- ceived as poor resource managers who regularly drew down the natural capital of soils, vegetation, and wild animals accumulated prior to human settlement and thus left their descendants with an impoverished landscape vulnerable to subsequent climate change, volcanic eruption, and early globalization impacts. Multiple site excavations and geo- archaeology trenches tied together with the isochrones provided by volcanic tephra (backed by a large series of AMS radiocarbon and a growing number of datable artifacts) built up over multiple field seasons now provide some chal- lenges to this view of human ecodynam- ics in Iceland. In the Mývatn region the early settlement period sites datable to ca. 875-940 analyzed to date do reflect what we now recognize as a standard “Landnám package" of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and horses. Zooarchaeological analysis has made plain that this package of animals was altered a number of times, most likely in response to both climatic pressures but also to political and market pressures. Archaeofuana from the Thomas McGovern; photograph taken in 2010 Mývatn sites show that the initial Landnám faunal profíle changed during the llth century as pigs and goats become increasingly rare, eventually effectively disappearing from the Icelandic archaeofaunal record by the mid 12th century. The medieval Grágás law code makes clear that pigs and goats needed control precisely to manage adverse environmental impacts (Dennis et al. 2000) and that the zooarchaeological shifts in species frequency are the result of rational assessment of cost and benefíts that were enforced on the community scale. These changes in husbandry strategies suggest that the Icelandic farmers were not all conservative 'prisoners of culture' incapable of responding to changing conditions around them or that they were incapable of using animals to create a landscape of their liking. The goats and pigs (who are such 45
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Archaeologia Islandica

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