population regulation, ecology, and political economy in preindustrial Iceland

Vasey, Daniel E.

doi:10.1525/ae.1996.23.2.02a00100

Cited by 22 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…In Iceland, for example, the population has shown remarkable resilience in the face of short-lived demographic shocks created by disease, famine, bad weather, sea ice, or volcanic impacts acting both alone and in combination (20,39,40).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural adaptation, compounding vulnerabilities and conjunctures in Norse Greenland

Dugmore

McGovern

Vésteinsson

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

150

107

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Norse Greenland has been seen as a classic case of maladaptation by an inflexible temperate zone society extending into the arctic and collapse driven by climate change. This paper, however, recognizes the successful arctic adaptation achieved in Norse Greenland and argues that, although climate change had impacts, the end of Norse settlement can only be truly understood as a complex socioenvironmental system that includes local and interregional interactions operating at different geographic and temporal scales and recognizes the cultural limits to adaptation of traditional ecological knowledge. This paper is not focused on a single discovery and its implications, an approach that can encourage monocausal and environmentally deterministic emphasis to explanation, but it is the product of sustained international interdisciplinary investigations in Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic. It is based on data acquisitions, reinterpretation of established knowledge, and a somewhat different philosophical approach to the question of collapse. We argue that the Norse Greenlanders created a flexible and successful subsistence system that responded effectively to major environmental challenges but probably fell victim to a combination of conjunctures of large-scale historic processes and vulnerabilities created by their successful prior response to climate change. Their failure was an inability to anticipate an unknowable future, an inability to broaden their traditional ecological knowledge base, and a case of being too specialized, too small, and too isolated to be able to capitalize on and compete in the new protoworld system extending into the North Atlantic in the early 15th century.Vikings | marine mammals | Little Ice Age | rigidity trap

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural adaptation, compounding vulnerabilities and conjunctures in Norse Greenland

Dugmore

McGovern

Vésteinsson

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

150

107

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“…It provides an environmental science-based counterpoint to the work by Daniel Vasey in Iceland on human buffering mechanisms (Vasey, 1996). Búmodel has been applied in Iceland to examine grazing management and landscape impact in the post-settlement and 18th century periods (Thomson and Simpson, in press), and is being used to look at similar questions in the Faeroe Islands.…”

Section: Further Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A grazing model for simulating the impact of historical land management decisions in sensitive landscapes: Model design and validation

Thomson¹,

Simpson²

2006

Environmental Modelling & Software

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This paper reports the construction and testing of a historical environmental simulation model, Búmodel (bú: Icelandic -farm estate or enterprise). The model permits the investigation of historical grazing management under variable environmental conditions in Iceland through the prediction of spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation biomass and utilisation. Input parameters of the model are environmental, livestock and management variables from historical and archaeological sources. Process sub-models were constructed using contemporary Icelandic data. Validation of the model was based on an independent, published grazing experiment and demonstrated that Búmodel-predicted utilisable biomass values and biomass intake values fall within G1 standard deviation of observed values.Búmodel provides a validated representation of linkages between environmental and management elements in a historical grazing system. It incorporates key issues of spatial and temporal scale, data quality, model validation and the inherent stochasticity of landscape change over historical periods. In doing so, it enables researchers interested in past landscapes to investigate the flexibility of the historical Icelandic grazing systems within the constraints of climate and vegetation cover, and provides a framework and methodology that can be applied to other historical extensive livestock-based agricultural systems. Access to the model is available at

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“…During the LIA, residents of Austur-Skaftafellssýsla also had to cope with frequently occurring volcanic eruptions that often deposited tephra (volcanic ash) across the area. Tephra may act as an agent of environmental and cultural change, either directly from fallout onto settlements (for example, theÖraefajökull eruption in AD 1362; Rórarinsson 1956), or indirectly, such as large-scale animal mortality and related famine caused by fluorosis (for example, the Katla eruption in AD 1755 and Laki in AD 1783 ;Vasey 1996).…”

Section: Synthesis Of Environmental Indicatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception, history, and science: coherence or disparity in the timing of the Little Ice Age maximum in southeast Iceland?

Mckinzey¹,

Ólafsdóttir²,

Dugmore³

2005

Polar Record

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ABSTRACT. In Iceland, studies that integrate local perceptions about the landscape with scientific evidence of change have been few. This article presents a case study from southeast Iceland that has two main objectives. Firstly, ethnographic data is used to explore the human dimension of the Little Ice Age through perceptions of landscape and climatic change and to describe the impacts that these changes had on life and livelihood. Secondly, the paper critically assesses the coherence of the scientific record regarding the Little Ice Age glacial maximum with evidence gained from the ethnographic survey and the local historical record. Although climatic deterioration from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries ultimately affected farming viability, it was the interplay of climate with concomitant cultural and socio-economic factors that ensured effective strategies were emplaced to preserve life and livelihood in southeast Iceland. Furthermore, despite different trajectories of perception emanating from either the scientific or the local points of view, data from all sources are strongly coherent and point to a Little Ice Age maximum during the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. This study also illustrates that sensitive landscapes can 'store memories' through the cumulative accumulation of disturbances during periods of climatic variability, eventually reaching a critical threshold and inducing landscape instability, such as occurred during the nineteenth century.

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population regulation, ecology, and political economy in preindustrial Iceland

Cited by 22 publications

References 72 publications

Cultural adaptation, compounding vulnerabilities and conjunctures in Norse Greenland

Cultural adaptation, compounding vulnerabilities and conjunctures in Norse Greenland

A grazing model for simulating the impact of historical land management decisions in sensitive landscapes: Model design and validation

Perception, history, and science: coherence or disparity in the timing of the Little Ice Age maximum in southeast Iceland?

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