Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Side 50

SOPHIA PERDIKARIS, GEORGE HAMBRECHT AND RAMONA HARRISON
in the memorable words of one grant
reviewer. In the past two decades, the
North Atlantic has taken its proper place
in world archaeology, and NABO collab-
orative projects have brought over US$
15 million in highly competitive grants
into our now productive and exemplary
region. International, interdisciplinary
collaboration, comparability in data col-
lection and reporting, active young
researchers, and a string of successful
long term projects productive for multi-
ple disciplines and combining cutting
edge research, education, and public out-
reach have been seen as worth íunding by
multiple agencies in many nations. The
results of such sustained large scale fund-
ing and sustained intense collaboration
have been transformative. At present, the
North Atlantic and the NABO coopera-
tive are increasingly seen as leaders in
interdisciplinary research into the com-
plex interactions of humans with land-
scape and seascape, climate change, and
each other.
This new status is reflected not only in
our notable inclusion in the best-selling
environmental popularization Collapse by
Jared Diamond (2005), and a string of
North American and European media
programs, but also in the selection of
NABO by NSF Office of Polar Programs
to organize a set of meetings intended to
take the North Atlantic experience global.
An NSF grant to McGovem, Perdikaris,
Dugmore and Ogilvie allowed an intema-
tional workshop at Eagle Hill Maine in
October 2009 that was hugely successful
in connecting teams similar to NABO
from Arizona to Antigua to the Atacama
desert and creating the groundwork for a
still more widespread scientific network
that produced the beginnings of a new
Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance
(www.gheahome.org). GHEA aims to
connect regional cooperatives and pool
ideas and resources on a wide scale that
will allow the long term record of human
interactions with the environment to
inform the present and strive to a better
collective future. We hope that many
North Atlantic scholars will want to go
global with GHEA and share their expert-
ise more widely. If Tom McGovem will
be predictably impatient with personal
encomiums, we know he will approve the
collective credit that this global scale
recognition of North Atlantic scholarship
does the whole broad team of collabora-
tors.
References
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