Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2013, Page 76

GUÐRÚN ALDA GÍSLADÓTTIR, JAMES M. WOOLLETT, UGGI ÆVARSSON, CÉLINE DUPONT-HÉBERT,
ANTHONY NEWTON AND ORRI VÉSTEINSSON
the 13th to 15th centuries, cattle
diminished greatly in relative importance,
and herding seems to have been
reorganised around a much more
specialised sheep herding strategy. Later
assemblages now attributed to the 15th
century to the 18th century showed an
abrupt and manifold increase in the
exploitation of marine resources notably
fish and seals. The latter taxonomic group
actually represented the majority of
mammal specimens during the later phases
(Amorosi 1992, 125). The shifts in
economic emphasis demonstrated in these
assemblages have been interpreted as
evidence of the impacts of, and
adjustments to, episodes of climate cooling
during the 13th and 17th/18th centuries.
Since 1988, North Atlantic archaeology
has benefited írom ongoing developments
in palaeoclimatology, palaeoenvironmental
studies, tephrochronological dating and
new fieldwork methodologies and a great
number of new survey and site-oriented
field projects which have brought new,
data-rich regional perspectives on
landscape change, subsistence and social
movements. While North Iceland has seen
particular emphasis in these new projects,
the bulk of this work has been carried out in
South-Þingeyjarsýsla (around Mývatn
area), Eyjafjörður and in the Westfjords
regions. The northeastem-most extremities
of Iceland, Þistilfjörður, Öxarfjörður and
Melrakkaslétta, have seen little ongoing
archaeological research since the IPP
project and Svalbarð remained until 2011
the sole major site investigated in the
region with significant faunal and
substantial artifact collections. In order to
refine and supplement the chronology of
this site of critical importance, the
Svalbarð midden was re-examined in 2008
as part of the program of the Island
Connections: Integrative Multi-scalar
Historical Ecology in Faroes, Iceland, and
Greenland project, funded by the National
Science Foundation Intemational
initiative, and as part of the Comparative
study of marine mammals in the
subsistence economies of the Labrador
Inuit and of Iceland during the Little Ice
Age project, funded by the Fonds
Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société
et la Culture (FQRSC)
In 2008, the midden’s stratigraphy
was re-evaluated and the midden was
re-sampled for geoarchaeological,
geochemical and archaeoentomological
analyses. Three tephras were noted in the
midden in 1988 and in the 2008
re-examination. These included a thick
layer of light coloured tephra in a sterile
compact organic silt overlying poorly
sorted fluvial deposits, and two thin and
closely-spaced tephras in the middle of
the midden section, the lower tephra
being pale green-grey in colour and the
upper darker grey. On the basis of visual
inspection and initial geochemistry, these
were initially and preliminarily identified
as the Hekla ashfall of circa 3000 BP,
and the Hekla 1636 and Vatnajökull
1717 tephras (Amorosi 1992: 115).
These tentative attributions provided
isochrones useful for subdividing the
midden’s stratigraphy into clear
Medieval and Post-Medieval phases, and
to clearly differentiate deposits
representing the 17th and 18th centuries.
As well, these dates permitted the
comparison of the midden’s
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