Search Project Results: Iceland

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	Fluorine poisoning in victims of the 1793-84 eruption of the Laki fissure	The eruption of the Laki fissure was the greatest calamity to affect Iceland since its settlement. It is estimated that 20% of the population died from starvation and disease. The aim of this project is to investigate causes of death in people who lived near the eruption. Written sources suggest that many may have died from fluorine posining. This is done by observing skeletal material - which first had to be located in graveyards known to have been in use at the time of the eruption.
	Arnórsstaðamúli	A site close to Arnórsstaðamúli, E-Iceland, was threatened by imminent roadworks and a preliminary excavation demanded by the National Heritage Agency.
	From Iceland to New Iceland. The Archaeology of 19th-century Emigration, Höfðaströnd, Skagafjörður	The project is apart of Agusta Edwald's current PhD research project at the Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen. The project is supervised by Dr. Karen Milek and Dr. Jeff Oliver. It aims to shed light on the experience of Icelandic immigrants to Canada in the late 19th century. It has been estimated that around 20,000 individuals emigrated from Iceland to North America in the late 19th century in the period from 1870-1914. The emigration amounted to an exodus from Iceland, which at the time was a sparsely populated colony of Denmark. Around one in five people left the country, an estimated 20% of the nation, with the majority settling in Manitoba. Adjustment to new cultures and environments is not automatic but involves conscious choices, decisions and actions of both individuals and groups. Archaeologists are well equipped to study periods of cultural contact as these decisions and actions are often manifested in the material culture of individuals and/or groups and are evident in the material record they left behind. By focusing on two farmsteads, one in Iceland and one in the former colony of New Iceland, Manitoba, the research aims to detect nuanced changes that were experienced during the emigration period and to narrate personal stories of peoples' lives. These narratives can then be juxtaposed with other research focussing on broad social changes and political reform during this transformative period in the history of both Iceland and Canada. The Icelandic farmstead was home to a family who emigrated to Canada in 1876. It is called Hornbrekka and is located in Skagafjörður in North Iceland. The excavation at Hornbrekka took place in August 2009. The Canadian homestead was claimed by an Icelandic family in 1878, it is called Vidivellir and is on the outskirts of Riverton, Manitoba. The excavation at Vidivellir took place in June 2010.
	The ash-fall from the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland: The formation of an environmental record, natural and cultural impacts, Eyjafjallajökull	This project will hold workshops to establish the best way to study the transformations and impacts of the volcanic ash fall from 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland. This eruption offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a new understanding of the formation of the enduring environmental record of eruptions and transform our knowledge of the environmental data preserved within volcanic ash layers. It would also refine our understanding of both past eruptions and their impacts on society and landscape. If the ways in which volcanic ash layers become transformed are better understood, then this could achieve four important goals: 1) we will be able to know more about the nature of the landscape onto which the ash fell and 2) the post depositional environmental processes operating on it; 3) we will be able to have a better idea of the nature of the initial ash fall and so 4) be able to better reconstruct the initial eruption. In the aftermath of the 2010 eruption the social and environmental impacts can be tracked in detail as they happen and it will be possible to discuss unfolding events and their consequences with the affected community. How does volcanic ash affect vegetation, water quality and drainage? What are the impacts on livestock? How does the ash-fall affect grazing, soil erosion and soil fertility? Where the ash was cleared, how was this done? What other impacts (negative and positive) has the eruption caused and how does this affect the viability of farming and other rural activities?
	Tephrochronology and landscape change in Skaftartunga, Skaftartunga	This project used very high resolution sediment accumulation records to analyse the environmental impact of population changes in this region of Iceland since Landnam, and finished in 2011. The main results are in Richard Streeter's PhD thesis and in publications in PNAS and the Holocene (see links below). Skaftartunga has one of the best resolution tephra records in Iceland - tephra layers from Hekla in 1341 and 1389, Katla 1416, Veidivotn 1477, Katla 1500 and Hekla 1597 document the period before, during and after the 15th century with great precision. This is important because this time sees large changes in the form of two plagues in AD 1402 and AD 1494, which kill c30-50% (Karlsson 1996) of the population. Elsewhere in Europe the black death creates an environmental record of land use regression (e.g. Van Hoof et al. 2007) but thus far there has been no attempt to correlate changes in geomorphology in Iceland with these major demographic events. Through fieldwork in 2008, 2009 and 2010 we have generated a database containing over 220 soil profiles in the region, which consists of nearly 3000 dated tephra layers, and many thousand high resolution (+/- 1mm) photogrammetric measurements of sediment accumulation (further details in the thesis and Holocene paper). This database can be used not only to investigate changes in the period immediately following the plauge in the early 15th Century, but the relationship between population changes and the geomorphic record more generally. By analysing the relationship between climatic records for the region, and population changes over the whole settlement period we hope to begin to quantify how the geomorphic record (which is influenced by many factors) is made. In particular the influence of other major demographic events such as the 1707 smallpox epidemic, 1755 famine and 1783 haze famine will be considered. As part of this analysis agent based population modelling to establish the resilience and recovery time after demographic shock is also being developed. Initial results indicate that there was an easing of landscape pressure after the first plague in AD 1402, which is seen as a reduction in sediment accumulation rates in the period AD 1389-1416 to levels which are comparable to the pre-Landnam level and the lowest in the post Landnam sequence. While this effect is short lived with rates returning to average post-Landnam rates in the period AD 1416-1477, this easing of landscape pressure may have increased overall landscape resilience. This may explain the lag between climatic deterioration in the 14th century and the geomorphic effects appearing in the late 18th century.
	Icelandic Freshwater Radiocarbon Reservoir Effects	The radiocarbon levels in carbon from freshwater systems of lakes and rivers can be lower than in carbon from the terrestrial biosphere. This makes freshwater carbon appear anomalously old when it is radiocarbon dated. In Iceland, freshwater systems are frequently affected by a Freshwater 14C reservoir effect, or FRE, due to inputs of ancient carbon from geothermal systems, and can appear several thousand years older than equivalent terrestrial samples. These FREs affect not only freshwater biota such as fish, but also organisms that consumed freshwater resources, such as pigs and humans. The present project centres on Myvanssveit, in the northern interior highlands of Iceland, where a large FRE has been identified in Lake Myvatn. The Norse inhabitants of the region relied upon a resource based that included freshwater resources, and consequently bone collagen from humans and pigs within the region may be affected by a FRE. The ongoing project aims to characterise and quantify the FRE within this region, and explore its impact upon 14C dating of Norse communities.
	Pagan Burial Maps , all over Iceland	Maps of Pagan Burials in Iceland developed through arcgis software and uploaded on Google Earth. In essence, the focus of this project was to create individual maps considerably zoomed in, showing not only the burials but also the landscape features surrounding each burial. The level of transparency of the maps is directly associated with Google Earth features so we can match their accuracy. It has been argued that in the Viking Age the choice of a placement of a burial could be related to the landscape, e.g. near a river or a farm. The reasons could vary from burying an individual near water – perhaps seen as a liminal zone between the land of the living and the dead; or near a farm in order to mantain the connection between the living and the dead (R Maher 2003). In placing these maps onto the layout of Iceland, it may be possible to perceive the landscape features around the burials in a more comprehensive way and perhaps create theories about the supposed association with the landscape.
	Survey of archaeological remains at Svínanes, Iceland, Reykhólahreppur
	The Siglunes Project: Long-term Investigations of Marine Economy in Eyjafjörður, Eyjafjörður, Siglufjörður, Siglunes Peninsula	The Siglunes site is characterized by a series of coastal remains associated with fishing-related activities on the peninsula itself, and an enormous farm mound and connected in-, and outfield complex on the mainland. 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.
	Evaluation of Archaeoentomology for Reconstructing Rural Life-Ways and the Process of Modernisation in Iceland	This project was initiated with Véronique Forbes's PhD dissertation at the University of Aberdeen 'Evaluation of Archaeoentomology for Reconstructing Rural Life-Ways and the Process of Modernisation in 19th and Early 20th-Century Iceland' (2013). The project seeks to evaluate the potential of archaeoentomology, the study of insects preserved in archaeological contexts, to help understand when and how the social, ideological and economic changes associated with modernization took place in various parts of Iceland. So far, the project has examined insects preserved in 19th and 20th century deposits from 3 archaeological sites from northern Iceland: Hornbrekka, Vatnsfjörður and Þverá. These have yielded the earliest records of now-cosmopolitan insect species including cattle ectoparasites as well as stored food pests originally found in tropical and subtropical regions. These insects can be used to clarify the timing and processes by which individual sites began tapping into international trade networks, farming came to be modernized and people's everyday practices and attitude were affected by ideologies of 'improvement'.