Human Ecology, Vol. 25, No. 3, 1997

Raiding the Landscape: Human Impact in theScandinavian North Atlantic

Thomas Amorosi,1 Paul Buckland,2 Andrew Dugmore,3Jon H. Ingimundarson,4 and Thomas H. McGovern1

Between ca. A.D. 800-1000, Scandinavian chiefly societies with a mixedmaritime and agricultural economy expanded into the North Atlantic,colonizing Shetland, Orkney, Caithness, Hebrides, Faeroes, Iceland,Greenland, and Vinland. The settlers brought continental European economicsand expectations to a widely varied set of island ecosystems. In many regions,rapid degradation of flora and soils took place associated with social andclimate change. Recent research coordinated by the North Atlantic BiculturalOrganization (NABO) highlights the extent of pre-modem impacts.

KEY WORDS: historical ecology; human impacts; Norse North Atlantic.

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this paper is to investigate from a historical ecological per-spective the interrelation of available cultural options, existing natural en-vironment, socially constructed cultural landscape, climatic change, andhuman economic impact in defining human occupational trajectories in themedieval North Atlantic. The Viking-age settlement and subsequent historyof Iceland and Greenland provide clearly constrained and well-documentedcase studies that can be used to explore the interaction of natural environ-ment and cultural landscape.

1Bioarchaeological Laboratory, Department of Anthropology, Hunter College, C.U.N.Y., 695Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021.

2Department of Archaeology and Prehistory, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN,United Kingdom.

3Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH1 1NR, Scotland, U.K.4Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721.

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0300-7839/97/0900-0491$12.50/0 C 1997 Plenum Publishing Corporation

National and international global change research programs have pro-liferated in the past 5 years, reflecting a deepening concern about the long-term viability of modern economic systems and a widespread desire toestablish patterns of "sustainable development" that will impoverish neitherhuman populations nor natural environments. Long-term sustainability pre-supposes a long-term perspective on past interactions of humans withchanging natural environment and with changing climate. However, modernmanagers still regularly attempt to devise sustainable exploitation schemesfor resources (like the Atlantic cod) based upon observational series shorterthan 150 years (McGoodwin, 1990; Amorosi et al., 1994). The recent col-lapse of the Atlantic cod fishery and the devastation of the fishing com-munities dependent upon it may serve as a dramatic warning of the dangersof such a short managerial memory (Vickers, 1994). As evolutionary ecolo-gists increasingly emphasize the fallacy of assumed homeostasis and theimportance of particular causal chains in particular historical contexts, thevalue of a long-term regional perspective becomes steadily more apparent(Winterhalder, 1994; Balee, 1996).

BACKGROUND: CLIMATE CHANGE, HUMAN IMPACT, ANDISLANDS

Fortunately a wealth of new data and a cluster of new theoretical ap-proaches provide a fresh opportunity to better understand the complex in-teractions of changing humans, changing local ecosystems, and changinghemispheric circulation and climate. The detailed, high resolution recordsnow available through the Greenland ice coring projects and related pa-leoenvironmental research provide the opportunity to investigate climateimpacts on the "human scale" of years and seasons, potentially resolvingmany of the scale matching problems that have for so long bedeviled in-terdisciplinary studies of climate and culture (McGhee, 1981; Fitzhugh,Lamb, 1985; McGovern, 1991). What can now be recognized as frequentlyabrupt, step-like climatic transformations surely had significant effects uponboth large, complex societies and smaller, simpler ones, but rarely in simplelinear, deterministic fashion.

Humans have seldom been passive receptors of environmental change.It is now increasingly appreciated that the impact of pre-industrial societieson terrestrial and marine ecosystems has been profound—reshaping wholelandforms as well as triggering waves of extinctions and alternations of fun-damental biogeography (Crosby, 1995). Environmental changes, driven bysocial, cultural, or economic factors can be independent of, mask, or ex-acerbate the consequences of climatic variation (Buckland et al., 1996). Hu-

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mans are a major factor in any historical dimensions of global change, andtheir impact cannot be ignored in any time period.

Thus climate change, continuous, and often stochastic change withinecosystems, and intended and unanticipated human impact all play rolesin producing particular outcomes in particular cases of human interactionwith land and resources. Interactions between so many causal variables be-come difficult to unravel without effective control of scalae and boundaryissues, and the idea of a clearly bounded laboratory thus becomes attractive.Islands have long been seen as bounded microcosms potentially resolvinggeographical scale problems and boundary issues. Islands near environ-mental and cultural thresholds might be particularly valuable settings forsuch laboratories, and thus northern islands may be particularly interestingsubjects for research. The North Atlantic third of the circumpolar zoneprovides several cases of potentially global significance, and has been thescene of several decades of intensive multidisciplinary research (summariesin McGovern, 1990; Bigelow, 1991; Morris and Rackham, 1992; Batey etal., 1993).

But can island continents really serve as laboratories for observationalexperiments directly applicable to. Are they instead special cases, not somuch small-scale models as simply small? How much of island interactionresults from their very boundedness and small size? These are major issuesin need of cooperative investigation. NABO attempts to make the past re-cord of human-environmental interactions in this important region acces-sible to scientists and planners attempting to cope with the complexities ofcurrent and true resource fluctuation. This paper reviews a working modelthat NABO members are constructing for the Western North Atlantic,based on a synthesis of research from archaeological excavations, docu-mentary research, and geological investigations.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Viking-age Scandinavian populations expanded into the North Atlanticbetween A.D. 800-1000, colonizing the eastern island groups of Shetland,Orkney, northern Hebrides, and the Scottish mainland by ca. A.D. 825.The more distant western islands, Faeroe, Iceland, Greenland, and Vinlandwere settled within the next three generations—Faeroe by ca. 860, Icelandby ca. 874, Greenland by ca. 985, and Vinland sometime around A.D. 1000(Jones, 1986; McGovern et al., 1988). This wave of seaborne migration car-ried an initially homogeneous culture, technology, and economy into thewestern hemisphere. The first settlers (Landnamsmen) shared a hierarchi-cal, chiefly political organization, a well-developed seafaring tradition, a

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subsistence economy based primarily upon domestic animals and some ce-real culturation, with a opportunistic readiness to exploit available wild re-sources of both land and sea. Subsequently, during the Medieval period,the various island communities became less homogeneous in subsistenceand trading economies, while at the same time undergoing political inte-gration into the Norwegian and later Danish Atlantic realms (McGovern,1990). The increasing diversification of economic strategy in the later Mid-dle Ages partly reflected local adaptation to significantly different local en-vironments, but also seems tied to the relative distance from, andintegration with, continental economies.

Religion and Ceremonial Architecture

At least nominal Christianity spread across the region by A.D. 1000.Churches were both status markers and sources of income, and were in-itially chiefly prerogatives. In the 12-13th centuries A.D., bishops graduallybegan to acquire actual economic and political control of their titular hold-ings, and rapidly became major players in regional politics. In A.D. 1127,the Norse Greenlanders traded a live polar bear for a Norwegian clericand set up their own bishopric at Gardar (Jones, 1986). Archaeologicalevidence (McGovern, 1992a) indicates that the Greenlandic episcopalmanor soon far outstripped its nearest competitors in size and probableeconomic power, though the interaction of secular and ecclesiastical chief-tains was undoubtedly complex (Arneborg, 1991; Keller, 1991). Church con-struction in the western North Atlantic was particularly intense in the12th-13th centuries, mirroring trends in continental Europe. Norse Green-landers produced a series of large stone churches fully equipped withstained glass and imported bronze bells, headed by the cathedral of St.Nicholas at Gardar (Berglund, 1991). The Icelanders constructed two largewooden cathedrals at Skalholt land Holar, also containing stained glass,bronze bells, and an impressive amount of imported building timber. Astone cathedral was built at Kirkjubour in the Faroes in the early fourteenthcentury (Elaisen, 1995), while St. Magnus cathedral in Kirkwall, Orkney(inspired by the cathedral of Durham, England) ranked among the majorRomanesque monuments of northern Europe (Cambridge, 1988). In theOuter Hebrides, Fleming and Wooly (1992) have recently identified a siteat Cille Donnain in South Uist as the seat of a twelfth century bishop, anddraw parallels with similar structures on the Western and Northern Islesof Britain. These island churches' absolute size rivals contemporarychurches in mainland Scandinavia. Relative to the size of the populationsconstructing them, they were enormous. By A.D. 1300, these North Atlantic

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communities had invested a massive amount of labor and scarce importedgoods on churches and ecclesiastical display, despite their position on veryrim of medieval Christendom.

Trade and Commerce

Trade and expanding market economy also connected the medievalNorth Atlantic to mainland societies. Some of the eastern islands experi-enced an archaeologically visible transition from Viking-period architectureand artifact assemblages to a "Late-Norse" pattern around A.D. 1150-1200(Bigelow, 1984; Barrett, 1995). This transition was marked by an incorpo-ration of a greater number and range of imported artifacts, elaboration offishing technology, adoption of domestically-produced pottery, and someless well-understood alterations in butchery pattern and site layout(Bigelow, 19898). It would appear that this transition may signal the grow-ing integration of local communities in the eastern North Atlantic into theexpanding bulk trade in fish products, connecting arctic Norway, Scotland,Shetland, and Orkney to markets in northwest Europe and the Baltic (Ur-bancyzk, 1992). This transition is less well-marked in the western NorthAtlantic settlements in Greenland, Iceland, and Faroe. Some sort of eco-nomic reorganization ca. A.D. 1150-1200 is suggested by changing patternsin animal bone deposited at the chieftain's arm V51 Sandnes in the West-ern Settlement (McGovern et al., 1996). However, this reorganization seemsto have involved an intensification of walrus hunting rather than fishing.Fish bones remain exceedingly rare in Greenlandic bone collections, despitefine mesh sieving and often outstanding conditions for organic preservation.In Iceland, the transition from subsistence to partly commercial fishing doesnot seem to predate the fourteenth century, and it only gradually expandedto encompass the whole island. The Greenlanders continued to carry outa long-distance hunt for walrus and polar bear well into the fourteenthcentury, continuing Viking-period patterns of long-distance exchange oflow-bulk prestige goods.

Human Impact

All of these Scandinavian Atlantic communities had significant impacton local flora, fauna, and landforms, but the long-term consequences ofthese impacts differed considerably. As Fig. 1 illustrates, pasture plant com-munities were closer to their environmental limits in Iceland and Greenlandthan in Shetland, Faroe, Norway, and Scotland, Part of this must reflectthe late arrival of settled agricultural systems in the more westerly islands,

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but grazing strategies that provided long-term sustainability in the easternNorth Atlantic produced unexpected stress on pasture and ground coverin the western North Atlantic. By the later Middle Ages, soil erosion anddeclining fertility were growing problems in Iceland (Thorarinsson, 1961;Dugmore and Buckland, 1991) and Greenland (Jacobsen, 1991). Recentsystematic correlations of layers of volcanic ash, tephra, dated by referenceto historical records, allow study of the dates of the onset and rate of soilerosion. In Iceland, large scale erosion began during the Landnam (firstsettlement) period (ca. 870-930) and developed with ever greater intensityin areas whose initial resilience was once considerable (Hallsdottir, 1987;Haraldsson, 1981; Dugmore and Buckland, 1991). In Greenland, Hansen(1991) and Jacobsen (1991) use radiocarbon dating to document similarlyrapid soil erosion in southwest Greenland associated with the Norse set-tlement there (beginning ca. 985).5 While we should not imagine that theterrestrial ecosystems of Iceland or Greenland were static before the Norsearrived, there can be no question that their arrival caused some of thegreatest disturbances to flora and soils since the end of the Pleistocene.

Climate Change

The North Atlantic is a region highly sensitive to fluctuations in north-ern hemisphere temperatures and circulation patterns, and has the poten-tial to swing rapidly between states (Barlow et al., 1993; Mayewski et al.,1994). During the period of the initial Norse expansion in the ninth-tenthcenturies, the North Atlantic may have been a calmer, warmer, and some-what more stable environment than it was to become after ca. 1300. How-ever, weather and climate were not uniformly favorable during the"Medieval Warm period" of the ninth-thirteenth centuries. Documentaryevidence (Ogilvie, 1991) indicates that cold years and runs of cold yearspunctuated this period. Glacier expansion, indicative of cooler and wetterconditions, occurred during the first four centuries of the Norse occupationof Iceland. Despite evidence of a climate as favorable for glacier develop-ment as any encountered during the sixteenth-nineteenth century in south-ern Iceland, core areas of settlement in the south and southwest exhibitlittle evidence of stress. Some inland sites were abandoned (Sveinbjarnar-

5While Rutherford (1995) finds no evidence for soil depletion in his study of soil profiles inseveral sites in Greenland, he failed to visit the major areas of (ongong) erosion in theEastern Settlement, and his single "Western Settlement" profile derives from the modernairport at Nuuk, over 80 km from the actual Norse Western Settlement area. Findings ofsignificant erosion associated with Norse agriculture documented by Hansen (1991), Jacobsen(1991), and Fredskild (1988) are based on far more extensive, long-term, and persuasiveresearch.

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Fig. 1. Accumulated day-degrees during the summer growing season of pasture grassesmeasured from modern (1930-1960) meteorological records following the method ofParry (1978). The figure documents the modeled impact of summers ca. 1° C warmerthan present (Medieval Warm Period best case) through three successive models forcooling associated with the Little Ice Age. Note the very different levels of resilienceof the modelled plant communities in Shetland, South Iceland, and West Greenland(for discussion of the model see McGovern et al., 1988). While plant communities aresimilar in species composition from Shetland to Iceland and Greenland, the northernislands bring the species closer to their biological limits, resilience in the face ofovergrazing or climate change will be very different.

dottir, 1992; Einarsson, 1994) and erosion was significant in ecologicallymarginal areas, but, for society as a whole, environmental problems do notappear to have been major concern in the early Middle Ages.

Beginning around 1300, the climatic cooling often called the "LittleIce Age" began to have a varied but significant impact on local subsistenceeconomies all across the North Atlantic. The new GISP2 Greenland IceCore data provide a wide range of climatic indicators with resolution downto the annual scale (and seasonal scale for some indicators to 1270; Barlow,1993). The isotopic data suggest an increasing frequency of cold summersand cold winters in the first half of the fourteenth century, with a clusterof very cold seasons in close proximity around 1350. The wider spectrumof chemical species, indicative of hemispheric circulation patterns on an-

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nual to decadal scale, suggests that the full transition from the MedievalWarm period to the Little Ice Age by ca. 1420 was the most significantand abrupt transition of the past 6000 years (O'Brien et al., 1995; Bucklandet al., 1996). Iceland's growing seasons shortened rapidly, stressing pasturesalready at least locally overgrazed. Impact in Greenland (as suggested byFig. 1) was probably significantly more severe. In both cases, climatic cool-ing probably interacted with priori human impact in a synergistic way.6

HARD TIMES-HARD QUESTIONS

The later Middle Ages and Early Modern period saw the completeextinction of the Greenlandic colony (ca. 1450-1500, Keller, 1989; McGov-ern, 1991, 1992a, 1994; Arneborg, in press) and major loss of populationin Iceland and perhaps in Faroe. The eastern settlements in Shetland(Bigelow, 1984, 1989) and Orkney (Morris, 1989; Batey et al., 1993) appar-ently experienced modest prosperity and population stability or increase.Commercial contacts, as well as reduced environmental vulnerability toovergrazing and reduced growing season, seem to have buffered the easterncommunities. However, by 1500, the Scandinavian settlements of the west-ern North Atlantic were dead or crippled, and profoundly adverse humanimpact upon soils and key plant communities is strongly implicated in thisgrim end to the Viking expansion. As the Icelandic soil scientist Runolfsson(1978) has said, the Icelanders owe their country more than one third ofits soil.

Why did subsistence strategies developed over many generations inmainland Scandinavia and Britain prove so disastrous when transferred toIceland and Greenland? Why did experienced northern maritime farmersfail to perceive and correct such adverse environmental impacts? Why dopeople make such bad land-use decisions, and continue making them gen-eration after generation? There are complex questions involving a long-term, dialectical interaction of culture and nature. A productive approachto these kinds of problems that bridges the processual/postprocessual splitand the viewpoints of "historical/political ecology" (Crumley, 1994; Gunn,1994; Park and Greenberg, 1994; Balee, 1996), may provide a more pro-ductive third path (see also Kelly, 1992).

6Many modern climatologists are uncomfortable with the use of periodizing terms like"Medieval Warm Period" (ca. AD 800-1300) or "Little Ice Age" (ca. 1300-1850), even withintheir original geographic contexts of NW Europe and North America, emphasizing theamount of variability within each period. Other climatologists are content to use the existingterminology, but with a series of geographical and temporal qualifiers attached.

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MODELING HUMAN IMPACTS-PALEOENVIRONMENTALEVIDENCE

Figure 2 provides a model of soil erosion in southern Iceland fromthe immediately pre-landnam period to the present (Dugmore and Buck-land, 1991). The spatial variation of sediment accumulation has been usedto infer patterns in timing and intensity of both vegetation loss and soilerosion (cf. Arnalds, 1987). In particular, it unravels the role of local factorsfrom wider regional trends. The figure is based upon a total of 18 tephralayers. The more important are the Landndmslag or Settlement Ash of 900A.D., an eruption that occurred around the time of the Norse arrival inIceland, and seven subsequent historic tephras. Abrupt stratigraphic changeabove the Landnam Tephra indicates a widespread, regional increase inerosion and associated deposition at the sites of the measured profiles. Therate of accumulation increase between A.D. 900-1510 is marked, peakingfirst in the upper elevations and then moving downhill. At upper sites be-fore A.D. 1341, very localized slopewash begins and spreads to lower levelsby the late fourteenth century. Extensive changes in the least ecologicallymarginal areas after 1510 are probably linked to breaching of vegetationcover and the development of major sediment sources depositing tends ofmeters of the measured profiles. A series of erosion thresholds, each as-sociated with a particular landform and ground cover, seem to have beensuccessively reached and then crossed. Each threshold state providedpoorer grazing than the last, though the lowest elevations would be im-pacted long after the upper elevations.

A similar trend as been noted for the Eastern Settlement of Greenlandby Jacobsen (1991). In a systematic investigation of the inland Vatnahverfidistrict, Jacobsen radiocarbon dated a series of soil profiles associated withNorse farmsteads. Jacobsen focuses on soil structure, recognizing the im-mediate impact of Norse grazing and agriculture upon fragile arctic A ho-rizons. His study documents major erosion impacts prior to the onset ofthe Little Ice Age around 1310. This agriculturally productive portion ofthe Greenland settlement seems to have followed the same downward ero-sion spiral as the Icelandic settlements, perhaps even more rapidly.

Buckland and Dugmore (1991) coined the term "ovigenic landscape"to explain the effect of grazing caprines (both sheep and goats) on dwarftrees, grasses, and sedges. However, zooarchaeological data indicate thatnot only caprines, but a mix of species with different feeding habits wereintroduced by the first Norse settlers. Cattle and goats could strip dwarftrees of leaves and bark, pigs efficiently tore up roots, and successive graz-ing of a subarctic woodland by horses, cattle, and sheep could rapidly rollback forests and prevent their regeneration. Together, cattle, horses, pigs,

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sheep, and goats make up the vast majority of the mammal bones recoveredfrom Norse sites in Iceland, with the caprines becoming more numerousrelative to the other taxa in later deposits (Amorosi, 1991, 1992; Amorosiet al., 1992, 1994b). While pigs become rare in later periods, their bonesare not uncommon in the ninth to early eleventh century archaeofaunafrom Iceland and Greenland—perhaps the change in flora they helpedcause made pigs more expensive to keep in the later landscapes (McGovernet al., 1993). These animals together form a "landnam package" that couldeffectively bulldoze diverse subarctic ecosystems into a more uniformsteppe/grassland pasture. Direct human intervention involving fuel collec-tion, charcoal making, and deliberate clearance with fire also had an im-mediate effect. In the Western Settlement of Greenland, the church farmof Sandnes was one of the first sites to be settled (Roussell, 1941). Theearly phases at the Sandnes site contain twig layer evidence of a brushclearing around the initial settlement area and a charcoal horizon in thesurrounding permafrost betrays the burning of much of the landscape topromote grass growth. Test pits near Norse sites throughout much of theWestern Settlement also contained thick willow and birch charcoal layersat the base of the Norse deposits, suggesting fire clearance at Landnamwas widespread (McGovern and Jordan, 1982). Pollen evidence fromGreenland parallels that of Iceland, confirming the rapid and widespreadremoval of scrub birch and willow forest (Fredskild, 1988). In Faroe, lackinga forest cover, the destruction of sod rapidly led to soil erosion and anovigenic landscape (Johanneson, 1985).

The creation of a cultural landscape from wilderness was thus not justa linguistic event, an the first settlers did a good deal besides provide namesto fjords, farms, and valleys. The regional picture of the rapid destructionof native vegetation is provided by pollen diagrams (cf. Fredskild, 1973,1988; Johanneson, 1985; Hallsdottir, 1987; Zutter, 1989, 1992), but the bal-ance book also includes many plant and invertebrate introductions, nearlyall of which are present by or shortly after Landnam (Buckland et al., 1991).Norse impacts on northern ecosystems were not uniformly destructive. Itis evident that eutrophication, by dung and other waste, both in middensand manure has also led to significant changes in the native insect faunas(Buckland et al., 1991), and introduced species spread rapidly into the sur-rounding landscape. The dung beetle, Aphodius lapponum, is as clear anindicator of settlement as any artifactual record (cf. Buckland, 1992).Manuring and local irrigation (Krogh, 1982) led to other changes in theflora and fauna which are still evident today, some 600 years after the siteswere finally abandoned. These particular plant communities directly aroundthe ruins are still benefiting from the Norse environmental impact. Itshould further be stressed that impacts upon the Arctic/cool Temperate

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landscape are variable, and whether a human modification looks favorable,neutral, or adverse depends on the scale that one examines. In the imme-diately local view, around farm sites, variable Norse agricultural impactswill be seen. But if one moves to a larger regional scale, more consistentpatterns emerge and an assessment of overall impact, the creation of thewhole cultural landscape and regional environment becomes clearer. Singlesite studies thus must be linked to a larger perspEctive, in the North At-lantic as elsewhere.

MODELING HUMAN IMPACT-ZOOARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

A very effective record of the interaction between people and the en-vironment can be produced by study of collections of vertebrate animalremains (archaeofauna) from archaeological sites. There are over 60 ar-chaeofauna now documented from Viking to Early Modern periods in Ice-land (Amorosi, 1989, 1991,1992; Amorosi et al., 1992, 1994b; Amorosi andMcGovern, 1993, 1994; Russell et al., 1986). The quantifiable archaeofaunacan be grouped (following traditional periodization of Icelandic history)into the Settlement period (ca. 870-930), Commonwealth era (ca. 930-1264), Later Medieval (ca. 1264-1500), and Early Modern period (ca. 1500-1800) collections.

The settlement period archaeofauna are represented by two sites, Tjar-nargata 4 located in downtown Reykjavik, and the Herjblfsdalur site situ-ated on Heimay in the Vestmann island group (Fig. 3). The two sites showa very high percentage of cattle and low of caprines, with some pigs present.Fish remains are relatively rare, while bird bones are very common, theTjarnargata 4 site also produced remains of the now extinct great auk andseveral fragments of walrus. The walrus bones include fragments of veryyoung animals, suggesting the presence of a breeding colony nearby. Earlywalrus-element place names in the Reykjarnes peninsula further suggestbreeding sites hunted out by the later medieval period. This would suggesta colonizing population emphasizing cattle breeding and exploitation of na-tive wild species in a previously unhunted landscape.

The Commonwealth period samples show a contrasting picture of cat-tle and caprines, as caprines become far more common than cattle (Fig.4). the two inland collections (Aoalbol and Hakonarstaoir) are dominatedby caprines, suggesting that the sheep herding pattern known from the dis-trict today extends back to the twelfth century. The lower layers at Svalbaro,on the northeast coast, bordering the Arctic Ocean, are relatively high inseals and whales, and fish seem to have become locally important. Theinland site of Granastaoir (Einarsson, 1994) was occupied for a few decades

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Fig, 3, Settlement Period (ca. 874-930) Archaeofauna from Iceland. The highpercentage of cattle to caprines (both sheep and goat) in these two early archaeofaunacorrespond to contemporary Norse collections in the eastern North Atlantic. The highpercentage of birds is more unusual, and may be an indicator of the initial impact ofhumans on previously uninhabited colonies. Both collections come from southernIceland.

around the mid-tenth century, and its archaeofauna contain a relativelyhigh percentage of pigs and horses, and a surprisingly substantial amountof fish carried in from the coast.

Later medieval materials (Fig. 5) from Svalbaro in the northeast, Mio-baer on the island of Flatey in Breioafjoro in the northwest, and the siteof Vioey in the Reykjavik area reflect a steady increase in the relative im-portance of fish. The large numbers of birds in the Vioey collection mayreflect the control of an elite site over bird-rich islands in the Faxafloi,while the large percentages of marine species in the Miobaer collectionsprobably reflect its island catchment area.

Early Modern archaeofauna (Fig. 6) come from the south coast(Stdraborg), the northeast (Svalbaro), northwest (Miobaer) and theReykjavik area (Bessastaoir, Vioey, Nesstofa). While seals are locally im-portant in the northeast, the faunal pattern has clearly become dominated

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Fig. 4. Commonwealth Period (ca. 930-1264) archaeofauna from Iceland. Thesecollections reflect increasing diversity in both the mix of domestic species and in theuse of wild resources. Note the general pattern of increase in caprines, and the variableuse of marine resources. The regional diversity in subsistence economy revealed by thebone collections is only hinted at in the sage literature, and as yet has been littlerecognized by historians.

by fish. These are mainly from the cod family, and their tremendous num-bers seem to suggest a shift to full-scale commercial exploitation.

While site formation processes and recovery and dating problems in-evitably inject stochastic "noise" into these bone patterns, these large mul-tiple collections also reflect patterning in the end results of planned animalproduction decisions worked out upon a series of landscapes undergoinghistorical change (Buckland et al., 1996). Different archaeofauna are thusthe product of a dynamic interaction between a farmer's particular hopes,animal biology and behavior, soil and pasture productivity, and regionalland use patterns constructed some time in the past. Landscapes were ina state of flux due not only to the Norse agricultural system but also dueto changing climate and continued geological processes of vulcanism, glacialmovement, deflation, and sedimentation. Homeostasis is rather hard todocument in this region in the past 1200 years.

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Fig. S. Later Medieval Period (ca. 1264-1500) archaeofauna from Iceland. Thesecollections continue to reflect considerable regional diversity in economy, with someindicators of increasing importance of fishing in some localities.

EXPLAINING HUMAN IMPACTS

Despite this very active and often harsh natural context for island cul-tural development, we should avoid potentially erroneous deterministic ex-planations that make climate induced change the major engine drivinghuman decisions and the resulting landscape impacts. Climate was certainlya major factor, but it may be too simplistic to make it the universal primemover, even in the North Atlantic. Where patterns of causation are so tan-gled, explanation inevitably walks a narrow line between one or anothersort of determinism and a muddled equifinality. The concepts of strategicand parametric contexts offered by the evolutionary ecologists Smith andWinterhalder (1992) may help our thinking here. Strategic issues are thosedirectly affected by individual and group planning: how many children toraise, what mix of animals to keep, how to lay out a settlement—all inter-connected and interdependent with simultaneous decisions made by otherhuman players. The parametric contexts, rainfall, growing season, depth of

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Fig. 6. Early Modern (ca. 1500-1800) archaeofauna from Iceland. The early modernarchaeofauna continue to show variability in subsistence patterns (note the substantialnumbers of seals taken at Svalbaro) in the northeast and at Miobaer in the northwest),but the most striking trend is the dominance of fish bones (almost all Atlantic cod) inall the collections. This would appear to be an archaeological signature for theintegration of Icelandic economy into the commercial fisheries of the Early Modernperiod.

topsoil, are less subject to strategic contingency, yet interact with the pre-dominantly social strategic choices.

To adopt a pseudohistorical saga position: if Thorbjorn and Eirik areat feud and distant pastures are not safe for herdsmen, grazing pressuremay shift from one locality to another within a district. If Thorbjorn andEirik's grandfathers were also at feud, and demand for food for axe-bearingtoughs has been constant, vegetation in the safer locations may now begetting thoroughly overgrazed. A subsequent shortening of the growing sea-son may have dramatic impacts, pushing the whole district over an erosionalthreshold. This then confronts Eirik and Thorbjorn with a whole new setof urgent strategic decisions, should they notice the environmental changeamid the barn-burnings and revenge killings. They may also passively oractively select the all too frequent farming strategy of "Someone Else'sProblem" (SEP), and leave it to their descendants to sort out (McGovern

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et al., 1988). Parametric factors thus can be affected by strategic choices,and are not simply rigid limitations on cultural expression. A more concreteexample is provided by the short sage of Ale-Hood (Palsson, 1971) wherea charcoal burner's carelessness devastates a chieftain's wood. The humanconsequences of the burning of Gooamork are detailed in the story; theecological ones are not.

It is important to stress the history in historical ecology. Contingencyand sequence matter—decisions made in specific strategic and parametriccontexts in the past by Eirik and Thorbjorn's grandfathers and grandmoth-ers can have irreversible strategic and parametric effects. Human strategicchoices create an intergenerational decision tree in which successivebranchings may progressively narrow options. Where irreversible environ-mental change is one consequence of prior option-branches, the tree maybe impossible to climb down and one can only go further up the brancheswhich are left. This issue of historical contingency and the ripples of earlydecisions is of course most evident in the context of newly colonized islandsKeegan and Diamond, 1987; Diamond, 1994). At some first time in awholly natural environment, a first pioneer (with inevitably little knowledgeof long term resource variability) sets the course for subsequent generationsby drawing a cartoon outline of a cultural landscape, usually in crayon,using a power grip. Later generations with more local knowledge and ex-perience might fill in the cartoon with a sharper point and finer control,but crayon is awfully hard to scrub out completely (Fig. 7).

It is also important to stress the political in political ecology. The Scan-dinavian North Atlantic was settled by chiefly societies, and specifically bychieftains rich enough to afford a ship and a full set of terraforming do-mestic stock. Access to resources, information, law, violence, literacy, anddecision-making power was concentrated in the hands of those who con-trolled the social landscape. It may be no surprise that these powerful fig-ures were usually the descendants of the very people who made still earliercritical first choices. As Scandinavian societies moved out into the NorthAtlantic, leadership roles were restricted to those who cold afford the shipand gear necessary for a successful voyage of colonization—Landnamsmanwas not an equal opportunity position (Wallace, 1991). Thus, when we lookat successive strategic decisions in successive parametric contexts we alwayshave to remember that these choices are made and enforced by a segmentof the society with a very definite political agenda, not by some ideal, class-less economic man. "Optimal for whom?" is a key question to consider inany investigation of landscape organization.

If we leave the moment of decision and focus on consequences, wemay see some common patterns. Available resources rapidly changed asthe island's ecology was modified due to the reduction of some species and

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Amorosi, Buckland, Dugmore, Ingimundaron, and McGovern

Fig. 7. Extinction, ecocide, environmental mismanagement, and the death of culturesare of source prime subjects for cartooning. Here a Viking-age decision-maker, alreadyclosed out of several prior options by prior decisions, faces a critical settlement choice.With his environmental modification tools around him constrained by past decisionsand his own knowledge and world view, the present landnamsman's choice will affectnot only his generation and its contemporary environment, but all succeeding ones aswell. Present strategic choices will forever constrain later choices whichever path ischosen.

the introduction of others. Subsequent cultural change developed withinthe island communities and in their relation to mainland markets and poli-ties, proceeding within a rapidly altering environment, and modified by a

508

combination of human activity and climate change feedback loops. Thresh-old crossings by humans, soils, or climate apparently produced sudden,stepwise transformations as often as any gradual transition (Fig. 8). Thresh-olds and lag times within these systems have produced a variety of specificsituations that may be expected to vary considerably on the local level buthave some common features on the regional level:

1. Natural capital depletion: The lack of prior human modificationeffectively buffered early Norse society from extremes of a prevailing cli-mate that now appears to have been significantly less favorable to agricul-ture than as it was conceived by the Landnamsmen. Iceland at the time ofsettlement was an island little affected by human activity, but its biologicaldiversity was restricted due to biogeographic accident, relative isolation,and high latitude location, close to the atmospheric and marine polar fronts(Buckland, 1988). The flora and soils of both Greenland and Iceland hadbeen developing since deglaciation without intensive grazing pressure fromdomestic mammals. Unknown to themselves, the first few generations weredrawing down an "environmental capital" (in the sense of Cronon, 1993)that would not be available to later settlers.

2. Synergistic Interactions: Extensive environmental modification ledto critical resource limitations in advance of major climatic changes in thefourteenth-fifteenth centuries. Climate change can accelerate and intensityhuman impacts, especially where the environmental capital has alreadybeen significantly depleted. Cold spikes that might have merely inconven-ienced tenth-century settlers exploiting richer pastures and deeper soils mayhave pushed their descendants over critical thresholds. It may be significantthat the first major human impacts attributable to the "Little Ice Age" areassociated with the first onset of cold seasons in the fourteenth century,rather than the major changes in circulation of the early fifteenth century.

3. Intensification and technological fixes: Technological and culturalchanges in recent times, especially the expansion of North Atlantic tradeand the commercial fisheries since 1500, have expanded the range of op-tions available to the Icelandic people, although long-term changes and thelegacy of past activity have produced a particularly restricted biological re-source base. It may be simplistic to state that cod fishing alone saved theIcelanders from the fate of their Greenlandic neighbors, but it certainlyhelped. The past 300 years have seen the survivors of the medieval westernNorth Atlantic Scandinavian colonies turn decisively to the commercial fish-ery that helped to sustain their relatives in the eastern North Atlantic sincethe twelfth century. The current crisis of North Atlantic commercial fishing(from Massachusetts to Lofoten) suggests that marine natural capital canalso be overdraw.

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Fig. 8. Arctic and subarctic landscapes are notably fragile places, prone to rapid shifts fromone metastable system to another as thresholds (Schumm, 1979) are crossed. In this context,the resurrection of a long dead model seems justified. Archaeologists have made severalattempts to play with the catastrophic models engendered by Zeeman (1977) (e.g., Renfrew,1978) which provide a useful framework to consider the rise and fall not only of complexsocieties (cf. Wagstaff, 1978), but also of more subsistence based ones. Three axes and thelocus of a point on the folded surface subtended to chart the rise and fall of Norse farmingon the North Atlantic islands are used. The three axes, while in themselves a reductio adabsurdum, provide the key players, with productivity, measured in hay yield, being directlyrelated to potential stocking levels. These, in turn, allow changes on the vertical axis, herelabeled as population, but equally this may be the number of occupied farms. Point Arepresents the number of Landnamsmen and productivity rises as more land is modified toincrease hay yields, in turn this allows increase in population, rising toward a maximumsustainable in a closed system. Much of the landscape modified for grazing and hay cropping,however, also passes a threshold and erosion and declining yields ensure. Inertia also entersinto the human system, usually driven by the potential inability to pay rents, and stockinglevels remain high, despite declining yields. Eventually stock numbers begin to decline, butthe inertia in the system still seeks to maintain human population at the same level. Whilethe locus of the point appears to trace a smooth curve, a fourth dimension, the impact ofclimate variability, essentially the saw tooth curve, imposes additional, less predictable changesin productivity of the modified natural system and a sudden downturn in this at the edge ofthe cusp leads to wider spread abandonment and a rapid crash in population. Landnam hasan irredeemable impact on the land. As a conceptual model, which obviates the tendencytoward monocausal explanations (it got cold, therefore the people all died), a catastrophetheory still has a role to play not only in arctic archeology, but in any region where closedisland systems occur.

ISLAND LABORATORIES?

Does an island's boundedness allow us to better understand and con-trol the multiple interactions of culture and nature, providing the long-sought laboratory for the study of cultural change? Restricted and oftenfragile island ecosystems certainly effectively dictate cultural options insome manner, though not in any readily predictable way. Despite the failureof environmental possibilist explanations, structural as well as surface simi-larities between patterns of biological island biogeography and human is-land history still appear provocative. In the North Atlantic, flexible,aggressively innovative Landnam populations often produced descendantswhose tenacious conservatism has been cited as a factor creating vulner-ability to climate change, or change of any sort (McGovern, 1981; Hastrup,1985).

However, the choices and perceptions of particular humans in particu-lar historical circumstances (which generally stretch far beyond a single is-land) must be the proximate origin of some of these recurring patterns.The key issues in island archaeology would thus seem to lie in this inter-action of particular, bounded environment with particular, historically con-strained human perception and politics: just as in continental cases. In theNorth Atlantic, humans appear to have been quite able to create a cogni-tive, highly politicized landscape in their heads and then to jam this land-scape down over a particular set of island ecosystems, often ignoring thebits that failed to fit. The resulting mismatch between idealized, out-of-phase human perception and rapidly (often unexpectedly) changing naturewas a major dynamic factor in subsequent local social and environmentalhistory. Settlement patterns, social institutions, land division, seasonalround, and even landscape names fixed in the first generations of settle-ment acquire a weight and inertia of their own and may provide an effectivebrake on radical innovation for subsequent generations focused more oninternal than external competition. Later, more settled and more numerousdescendants may be justifiably concerned with creating some sort of sta-bility out of the chaos of the (generally unanticipated) rapid environmentaland social changes flowing from the manifold disruptions of the land-takers.

1. Founder effect (Or in our region the "Skallagrim Effect"): First set-tlement period in an island or island group would be particularly criticalfor studying the branching effects of particular choices by particular peopleon the creation of a cultural landscape. Following along these lines, "Skal-lagrim's Error" should also be intensively examined. As any land surveyordreads, an initial measurement error compounds over time. When the firstNorse settlers arrived with a particular mix of livestock, did they program

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into their landscape the initial error that caused such widespread soil ero-sion today?

2. Scale effects: Islands may indeed be good places to look at the ef-fects of different sized spaced on human decisions and environmental im-pacts, but scale is partly geographic and partly cultural. For an Inuitmaritime hunter, Greenland's long fjorded coast is vastly larger than all ofIceland's pasture land, with more possibilities for settlement and scope forhistory. However, a cattle-raising Norse farmer limited to the pastures ofGreenland's inner fjords, bounded by steep mountains and the inland ice,had a much smaller scope than his contemporaries in Iceland. Greenlandlacks an even particularly vegetated interior, and has a set of ecologicallimits that are faster to reach and easier to recognize. The narrow fjordsof Greenland thus may produce a cognitively "full" settlement pattern morerapidly after first settlement than Iceland's more open landscape. For aNorse farmer, Greenland, like Faroe, is thus rather tiny and claustrophobic,definitely not an open frontier of limitless horizons. Differences in culturalscale are worth examining systematically in different historical contexts.

3. Circumspection: Following upon the last point, different islandscales and different distributions of resources on a cognitive landscape willproduce different patterns of circumscription (Carneiro, 1988). It now maybe a good time to look more systematically at the effects of warfare andsocial composition in island contexts. How do different patterns of land-scape definition lead to different critical thresholds for warfare (Keegan,1993)? If warfare is culturally constrained, what are the mechanisms atwork? Is all circumscription the same in its effects in all cases?

4. Equilibrium or extinction: Since islands are regularly used as analo-gies to spaceship earth, it is of more than passing interest if the archae-ological record indicates many cases of long-term equilibrium betweencultural landscapes and local ecology, or if the depressing "rape, ruin, andstarve" pattern is widespread. Certainly the Scandinavian North Atlanticoffers little evidence for such long-term equilibrium, especially in the west-ern colonies of Greenland and Iceland. By A.D. 1500 the land use patternsof these settlements had left one dead and the other nearly crippled. Cli-mate change may have accelerated these results, but human decisions werethe core problem in the devastation of terrestrial and (to a lesser degree)marine resources Commercial fishing in the later Middle Ages and earlyModern period offered a route to survival and even modest prosperity forIcelanders. Or did it? The present state of the North Atlantic cod fisheriessuggest that the de facto management strategy (making sure that it is yourtrawler that gets the last surviving cod) is not a viable long-term plan. Ifcurrent trends continue, cod may be as rare as soil in the North Atlantic,and for the same reasons.

512 Amorosi, Buckland, Dugmore, Ingimundaron, and McGovern

Island historical ecology has substantial potential as a focus in the in-terdisciplinary investigation of the human and environmental componentsof global change. If sustainable development is to become a reality ratherthan a slogan, then we must develop well-controlled case studies document-ing long-term human interactions with environments. If the islands of theNorth Atlantic are indeed valid microcosms of the larger whole, then islandearth may be in deep trouble.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research conducted in Iceland and Greenland has been generouslyfunded by the American Scandinavian Foundation, the National Geo-graphic Society, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the ProfessionalStaff Congress of the City University of New York, the N.A.T.O. ScienceCouncil, and the U.K. Leverhulme Trust. Among the many contributors tothe research program, special thanks are due to Bjarni Einarsson, ChristianKeller, Gro Jerpasen, Guomundur Olafsson, Sophia Perdikaris, MjollSnaesdottir, Gudrun Sveinbjarnardottir, and Jim Woolett for their insight-ful comments, and hard work in much of the original fieldwork. Also aspecial thanks are due to the organizers of the islands symposium, TerryHunt and Ben Fitzhugh, as well as the organizers of the SAA 1994 sym-posium of Prehistoric Human Impacts of the Environment: a Global Per-spective, S. James and Chas. Redman, for allowing us to try out someconcepts before coming to press. This is a cooperative NABO ResearchProject. For more information about NABO, the North Atlantic BiculturalOrganization, contact Sophia Perdikaris, Hunter Bioarchaeological Labo-ratory, Hunter College CUNY, New York 10021.

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