IPY: Long Term Human Ecodynamics in the Norse North Atlantic: cases of sustainability, survival, and collapse.

Cuny Hunter College, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

IPY: Long Term Human Ecodynamics in the Norse North Atlantic: cases of sustainability, survival, and collapse. Why do societies succeed or fail when confronted with climate change, culture contact, and the unexpected outcomes of long term human impact upon landscape and resources? North Atlantic provides some unique case studies for the collaborative, cross-disciplinary study of these fundamental questions. Just over 1000 years ago, a wave of Viking-Age Scandinavian colonization brought a common culture, language, and set of economic strategies from Norway to Newfoundland. By 1800, these once uniform island communities had experienced radically different fates: the Greenland colony was totally extinct, Icelanders were barely surviving in a heavily eroded landscape, and the Faroese were continuing a stable and successfully sustainable thousand year long adaptation with apparently little erosion or population loss. These contrasting case studies provide the focus for an international, interdisciplinary project that makes use of the International Polar Year (IPY) initiative to bring together scholars, students, and local community members from Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands in a cooperative effort to; 1) Understand the complex dynamics of human-environment interaction on the millennial scale, human impact on island flora, fauna, and soils, sustainable and unsustainable resource use, the impacts of climate change, interactions between subsistence and exchange economies; 2) Collect and analyze directly comparable data sets (artifacts, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, geoarchaeology) from coordinated regional-scale excavations taking place on all three islands as an IPY surge activity, sharing gear, specialists, and excavation staff for inter-comparability, 3) Involve local communities in the research effort and aid them in making inter-island connections which will aid their own outreach efforts, 4) Engage US and international students at high school, undergraduate, and graduate level in fieldwork and in the development of K-12 classroom materials.