The Siglunes Project: Long-term Investigations of Marine Economy in Eyjafjörður

Project Details

Although heavily impacted by coastal erosion, the fisheries portion of the site offers a most unusual opportunity to consider the development of commercial fishery in its local environmental and cultural context, thanks to a well stratified archaeofaunal record that gives insights into the Atlantic marine ecosystem before the ‘great whale massacre’ and through the major climatic shifts of the MCA-LIA. The stratified deposits at Siglunes have excellent organic preservation, and preliminary work in 2011-2013 recovered significant amounts of well-preserved mammal, fish, and bird bone. The Siglunes faunal and structural deposits are dated by AMS radiocarbon, volcanic tephra, artifacts, and documentary sources to span the 9th to early 20th centuries AD and represent a major archive not only for archaeology, zooarchaeology and environmental history, but for fisheries biologists and marine mammal conservation science.

Siglunes research is ongoing and hopes to not only provide further investigation of the fishery portion of the site, but also the long-term farming activities.

Recent analysis of the recovered archaeofauna from targeted midden areas has already provided valuable insight into the Viking Age to Late Medieval Marine Resource Exploitation and potential local and regional subsistence and exchange strategies.

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