RESEARCH PROJECT: The history of the Norsemen is rapidly evolving due to a concerted interdisciplinary research effort among archaeologists, historians, climatologists and other scientists
In 1992 the “The North Atlantic Biocultural Organization” (NABO) was formally founded in an effort to improve communication and collaboration among the growing number of scholars interested in the North Atlantic region who shared common interests but lacked a common forum for regular meetings and exchange of ideas.
Initially focused upon the archaeology and paleoecology of Viking Age colonization from Scandinavia and the British Isles, the NABO cooperative has progressively expanded in temporal and geographic extent (ranging from Prehistory through the Early Modern period and with participating projects spread from Labrador to Finnmark).
NABO is strongly interdisciplinary as well as international and has aided scholars from a broad range of disciplines to set up wide ranging collaborative investigations of the interactions of humans, landscape, seascape, and climate change in the region. NABO participants have been recognized for contribution of a long-term perspective to contemporary problems of global change, and the cooperative has been notably successful in attracting substantial funding to the region from sources on both sides of the Atlantic.
NABO works to aid northern logistics, reduce costs, and pool funding for common projects as well as organise conferences, publications and archaeological field schools. NABO has also sponsored joint purchases of vehicles and other expensive field gear and has provided radiocarbon dates and specialist assistance for multiple field projects. Working groups have produced common data management systems and field staff exchange programs have provided opportunities for spreading best practice and improving the comparability of field and laboratory work across the region. NABO works with local institutions and communities to improve outreach and education at all levels. Monographs, edited conference volumes, special issues of journals, and many individual articles in peer reviewed journals have all resulted from NABO collaborative efforts over the past years.
NABO successes have been the direct product of the hard work and exceptionally strong personal commitment of its members for nearly two decades, and it is gratifying to see equal enthusiasm and still greater energy exhibited by the many younger scholars now involved in North Atlantic collaborative research. All this is witnessed by a very lively website and the continued flow of new research published at conferences and journals.
In the current pipeline are publications of results from excavations in Iceland of the Hofstadir cemetery (Iceland), viking and medieval fishing stations in Iceland, the archaeology of settlement and abandonment of Svalbard, archaeology of sustainability in the North Atlantic Region, continued investigations at Vatnahverfi as well as results of the outreach to communities around archaeological sites.
SOURCE:
NOBO
READ MORE:
In the Footsteps of the Norsemen – a video from the National Museum of Denmark