Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Page 48

SOPHIA PERDIKARIS, GEORGE HAMBRECHT AND RAMONA HARRISON
effective deforesting agents worldwide
and provide an excellent way to convert
initially over-abundant wood land into
human food) had done their job by the
later 12th century. Forests had shrunk, or
to put it another way, pastures had
increased to the point where their services
were no longer needed. Palynological data
collected by Ian Lawson and Katy
Roucoux (Leeds) and work on widespread
charcoal pits by Mike Church (Durham)
suggest a complex pattem of deforestation
and multiple woodland use for the region
that also appears to reflect a long term
nuanced management strategy not easily
reconciled with the early view of ecocidal
Viking Age settlers (Church et al. 2007,
Lawson et al. 2009).
Mývatn is today world famous for its
huge migratory waterfowl population
migrating from both Eurasia and North
America. Documentary records extending
to the mid-19th century indicate this
natural resource has been sustainably
managed to produce tens of thousands of
eggs annually for human consumption
without endangering the waterfowl
population. Farmers carefully collected
only a few eggs per nest and did not
normally kill adult birds. Excavations in
Mývatnssveit have repeatedly uncovered
sheets of bird egg shell in midden contexts
datable from first settlement down to the
18th century, and SEM analysis has
revealed that most are indeed duck eggs.
At the same time, there are few bird bones
in fhe archaeofauna, and these are nearly
all ptarmigan (grouse) not waterfowl. It
would appear that sustainable management
on the community level has been effective
in Mývatn for over 1200 years.
Marine Resource Networks and
the Origins of the Codfish Trade
The same archaeological sites from the
Mývatn region have revealed a surprising
amount of specimens of marine species,
given their location 50-70 km from the
sea. While seal bones, porpoise, eggs of
marine bird species, and marine mussel
shells (that were most likely transported
attached to seaweed) have been found at
sites in the Mývatn region, the most com-
mon marine resources found are cod-
family (Gadidae) fish. Local trout and
charr (Salmonids) from Lake Mývatn and
the surrounding rivers make up the
majority of identified físh specimens at
all the sites, but surprisingly the marine
fish bones regularly make up 15-20% of
the físh remains from these deep inland
sites datable to the 9th to 19th centuries.
Analysis of the skeletal element distribu-
tion reveals that the marine fish in earliest
times soon after the 871 Landnám tephra
fall entered Mývatnssveit as headless flat
or round dried prepared fish similar to the
better known stockfish traded worldwide
by late medieval times. This Viking Age
distribution of marine resources in inland
sites in Iceland is best dated in the
Mývatn region but there are other inland
sites outside of the Mývatn region in
Iceland where marine resources have
been recovered (McGovem et al 2006).
Despite a well developed Viking Age
farming economy and locally available
freshwater fish and wild birds inland
farmers in Iceland felt the need to provi-
sion their households with dried fish
products and these were indeed widely
available. This at a time when research
has demonstrated that marine fish prod-
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