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The authors would also like to acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation, specifically the Arctic Social Sciences Program, and RANNIS (The Icelandic Center for Research). Archaeological records provide a unique source of direct data on long-term human-environment interactions and samples of ecosystems affected by differing degrees of human impact. Distributed long-term datasets from archaeological sites provide a significant contribution to establish local, regional, and continental-scale environmental baselines and can be used to understand the implications of human decision-making and its impacts on the environment and the resources it provides for human use. Deeper temporal environmental baselines are essential for resource and environmental managers to restore biodiversity and build resilience in depleted ecosystems. Human actions are likely to have impacts that reorganize ecosystem structures by reducing diversity through processes such as niche construction. This makes data from archaeological sites key assets for the management of contemporary and future climate change scenarios because they combine information about human behavior, environmental baselines, and biological systems. Sites of this kind collectively form Distributed Long-term Observing Networks of the Past (DONOP), allowing human behavior and environmental impacts to be assessed over space and time. Behavioral perspectives are gained from direct evidence of human actions in response to environmental opportunities and change. Baseline perspectives are gained from data on species, landforms, and ecology over timescales that long predate our typically recent datasets that only record systems already disturbed by people. And biological perspectives can provide essential data for modern managers wanting to understand and utilize past diversity (i.e., trophic and/or genetic) as a way of revealing, and potentially correcting, weaknesses in our contemporary wild and domestic animal populations. Postprint

This article combines new marine fish faunal data from medieval and early modern Icelandic archaeological sites with previously published data that focused primarily on the Settlement and Commonwealth periods. This synthesis places these new data into the larger scale of Icelandic history and marine conditions (sea-surface temperature and sea ice) to identify patterns and trends across the last 1000 years of the relationship between humans and Icelandic cod populations. We find no direct correlation between zooarchaeological patterns and sea ice or storminess in the medieval period and a possible correlation in the early modern period. We argue that this suggests a nuanced relationship between changing climates and fishing patterns in Icelandic history. While changes in sea temperature and periods of increased storminess might have made fishing productivity more variable and at times more dangerous, it is only in the early modern period that we see change in the marine zooarchaeological record that might indicate a correlation. Instead, we contend that the impacts of the changing climate relative to marine resources were mediated by social, political, economic, and even technological variables.

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these hypotheses, we generated mitochondrial DNA and geometric morphometric data of skull and dental elements from a total of 922 North American Arctic dogs and wolves spanning over 4500 years. Our analyses revealed that dogs from Inuit sites dating from 2000 BP possess morphological and genetic signatures that distinguish them from earlier Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and identified a novel mitochondrial clade in eastern Siberia and Alaska. The genetic legacy of these Inuit dogs survives today in modern Arctic sledge dogs despite phenotypic differences between archaeological and modern Arctic dogs. Together, our data reveal that Inuit dogs derive from a secondary pre-contact migration of dogs distinct from Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and probably aided the Inuit expansion across the North American Arctic beginning around 1000 BP. Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these hypotheses, we generated mitochondrial DNA and geometric morphometric data of skull and dental elements from a total of 922 North American Arctic dogs and wolves spanning over 4500 years. Our analyses revealed that dogs from Inuit sites dating from 2000 BP possess morphological and genetic signatures that distinguish them from earlier Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and identified a novel mitochondrial clade in eastern Siberia and Alaska. The genetic legacy of these Inuit dogs survives today in modern Arctic sledge dogs despite phenotypic differences between archaeological and modern Arctic dogs. Together, our data reveal that Inuit dogs derive from a secondary pre-contact migration of dogs distinct from Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and probably aided the Inuit expansion across the North American Arctic beginning around 1000 BP.

Walrus-tusk ivory and walrus-hide rope were highly desired goods in Viking Age north-west Europe. New finds of walrus bone and ivory in early Viking Age contexts in Iceland are concentrated in the south-west, and suggest extensive exploitation of nearby walrus for meat, hide and ivory during the first century of settlement. In Greenland, archaeofauna suggest a very different specialized long-distance hunting of the much larger walrus populations in the Disko Bay area that brought mainly ivory to the settlement areas and eventually to European markets. New lead isotopic analysis of archaeological walrus ivory and bone fromGreenland and Iceland offers a tool for identifying possible source regions of walrus ivory during the early Middle Ages. This opens possibilities for assessing the development and relative importance of hunting grounds from the point of view of exported products.

Multidisciplinary approaches are used to examine possible changes in North Atlantic sea-ice cover, in the context of seal hunting, during the period of the Norse occupation of Greenland (ca. 985–1500). Information from Iceland is also used in order to amplify and illuminate the situation in Greenland. Data are drawn mainly from zooarchaeological analyses, but written records of climate and sea-ice variations, as well as paleoclimatic data sets are also discussed. Although it should be noted that any use of seal bones from excavated archaeofauna (animal bone collections from archaeological sites) must recognize the filtering effects of past human economic organization, technology, and seal-hunting strategies, it is suggested that differing biological requirements of the six seal species most commonly found in Arctic/North Atlantic regions may provide a potential proxy for past climate, in particular sea-ice conditions. It is concluded that an increase in the taking of harp seals, as opposed to com...

Significance Climate-induced disasters are impacting human well-being in ever-increasing ways. Disaster research and management recognize and emphasize the need to reduce vulnerabilities, although extant policy is not in line with this realization. This paper assesses the extent to which vulnerability to food shortage, as a result of social, demographic, and resource conditions at times of climatic challenge, correlates with subsequent declines in social and food security. Extreme climate challenges are identified in the prehispanic US Southwest and historic Norse occupations of the North Atlantic Islands. Cases with such different environmental, climatic, demographic, and cultural and social traditions allow us to demonstrate a consistent relationship between vulnerability and consequent social and food security conditions, applicable in multiple contexts.

Excavations in 1990 in North-West Iceland documented a stratified series of small turf structures and associated midden deposits at the eroding beach at Akurvik which date from the 11th–13th to the 15th–16th centuries AD. The site reflects a long series of small discontinuous occupations, probably associated with seasonal fishing. The shell sand matrix had allowed excellent organic preservation and an archaeofauna of over 100,000 identifiable fragments was recovered. The collections are dominated by fish, mainly Atlantic cod, but substantial amounts of whale bone suggest extensive exploitation of strandings or active whaling. This paper briefly summarizes the excavation results, presents a zooarchaeological analysis of the two largest radiocarbon dated contexts, and places the Akurvik collections in the wider context of intra-Icelandic and inter-regional trade in preserved fish. Analysis of the Akurvik collection and comparison with other Icelandic collections from both inland and coastal sites d...

Introduction The end of Norse Greenland sometime in the mid to late fifteenth century AD is an iconic example of settlement desertion commonly attributed to the climate changes of the ‘Little Ice Age’ combined with a generalized failure to adapt (for example, Diamond, 2005). The idea of chronic Norse adaptive failure has been widely accepted, in part because other peoples in Greenland (the Thule Inuit) survived through the period of Norse extinction. Human settlement of Greenland was definitely possible through the climate fluctuations of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries AD, despite increasingly well-documented changes in temperature, probable growing season, sea ice, storminess and sea level. The Inuit achieved sustainability during this period of instability and change, but the Norse did not. It is assumed there must have been some degree of Norse maladaptation or more constrained limits to their adaptations than those of the Inuit, and the Norse are seen to have ‘chosen extinction’. We suggest that the picture emerging from recent and current research is far more complex, and propose that the Norse had achieved a locally successful adaptation to new Greenlandic resources but that their very success may have reduced the long-term resilience of the small community when confronted by a conjuncture of culture contact, climate change and new patterns of international trade. The reasons for the final collapse of Norse Greenland are still incompletely understood, but new data from Greenland and across the North Atlantic, combined with changing ideas and developing cognitive frameworks, are refining and deepening our understanding on both adaptation and its limits (Dugmore et al., 2007a; McGovern et al., 2007).