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.
This International Polar Year project focused upon the Viking Age colonization of the North Atlantic islands (Greenland, Iceland, Faroes, Shetlands) by a mixed Scandinavian/ Celtic population sharing common language, economic adaptations, and technology. As time passed, these island communities diverged, with the Greenlanders becoming increasingly specialized seal hunters, Faroese concentrating on barley and sea bird harvest, and the Icelanders mixing herding with marine fishing. Human impact on the different islands was mixed, and we now recognize many cases of long term sustainable use of wild birds, seals, and timber resources along with cases of draw down of natural capital and failure to conserve pastures in the face of unexpected climate change. The communities of the North Atlantic were to have dramatically different fates by 1492- the Greenlanders dwindling to complete extinction, the Faroese maintaining small but sustainable villages, and the Icelanders surviving volcanic eruption, massive soil erosion and climate fluctuation. Sustained field and laboratory cooperation among US, Canadian, Greenlandic and Scandinavian researchers has generated over two tons of newly excavated animal bone from stratified deposits across the region, thousands of artifacts, and hundreds of new radiocarbon dates. Major new excavations of medieval cemeteries and pre-Christian burials combined with new Strontium, Carbon and Nitrogen isotopic assays and ancient DNA work allow detailed reconstruction of migration patterns, diet, and life history of the Viking settlers and their descendants. These new data provide new perspectives on the different long term trajectories of the complex interaction of these island "social-ecological systems" with local and regional climate change, unanticipated results of human resource use, and the early impacts of a growing world system economy. This IPY project also strengthened connections with host communities in the N Atlantic, involving local residents and school systems in field projects and pioneering a 'GPS+Camera' program that provided classes with simple digital tools to record place names and elders' lore as part of a place based learning program that allowed upload by classes of GPS points and attached information to the common project Google Earth based website. This GPS+Camera project is now spreading to Scotland and the Caribbean and shows great promise for engaging students and the wider public in place based education for sustainability and empowering rural residents to contribute to global science. The project leaves a major IPY legacy in science, education, and public engagement.
