Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2013, Page 74

GUÐRÚN ALDA GÍSLADÓTTIR, JAMES M. WOOLLETT, UGGI ÆVARSSON, CÉLINE DUPONT-HÉBERT,
ANTHONY NEWTON AND ORRI VÉSTEINSSON
sea bird harvesting afforded by access to
a rich and resilient marine ecosystem
(Brewington and McGovern 2008;
Church et al. 2005). At the northwestem
edge of the Norse North Atlantic, the
Greenland settlements, which lasted into
the 15th century, took the form of highly
isolated farms stmng out along fjords and
valleys. Subsistence there depended
largely on goat and sheep herding and the
hunting of caribou and sea mammals
(McGovern 1994). Iceland represents
something of a middle ground between
these two extremes. Settlements there
were typically dispersed farmsteads
rather than villages (Vésteinsson 2006).
However, some very limited cereal
cultivation and more intensive pastoral
farming focussed on cattle, sheep and
goats was practiced in the comparatively
moderate south of Iceland, while more
diversifíed economies emphasizing
sheep and goat herding, fresh and
salt-water fishing, bird hunting and sea
mammal hunting were more common in
the less hospitable North (Amorosi 1996,
Vésteinsson et al. 2002; McGovem et al
2006).
As documented through historical
sources and archaeology, Iceland’s early
history can be divided into three periods:
a) an initial phase of landnám
(“land-taking”) and society building (circa
850 to 1000 AD), when elites established
themselves in choice places in coastal
lowlands developing systems of economic
exploitation and political control over
more numerous and often much more
marginally placed clients; b) a period of
consolidation and reorganisation (from
circa 1000 to 1300 AD), which saw the
unravelling and readjustment of some of
the economic strategies adopted at the
beginning of settlement and an escalation
in political conflict; and c) a period of
stability and/or stagnation (from circa
1300 AD lasting into early modem times)
characterized by more stable
socio-economic stmctures and generally
conservative responses to extemal change,
whether climate cooling, plague or market
opportunities. Population growth,
renewed interior settlement and an
increase in market-oriented economic
production only began in the 19th and
early 20th centuries (Dupont-Hébert
2012; Karlsson 2000; Róbertsdóttir 2008).
Recent archaeological research
provides indications that Iceland’s
farming economy was not always
entirely well adapted, both in terms of its
productivity during climatically harsh
periods and in terms of its unintended
landscape impacts. A series of notable
climatic challenges are now
demonstrated by regional multi-proxy
syntheses of climate data (Dugmore et al
2009, Mann et al 2009; Patterson et al
2010) including markedly greater
inter-annual climate variability after
1300, the sudden onset of summer
coastal pack ice conditions in south
Greenlandic and Icelandic waters from
circa 1275 to 1300, (Ogilvie and
Jónsdóttir 2000; Ogilvie et al. 2009), a
series of cold summers followed by a
series of very cold winters in the mid
14th century and atmospheric circulation
changes resulting in greater storminess
by ca. 1425. A second phase of climate
variability and cooling brought summer
pack ice to northern Iceland during
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