Welcome to NABO

Gavin Lucas and Fornleifastofnun Íslands have received the DV Cultural Award for The Hofstaðir. Excavations of a Viking Age Feasting Hall in North-Eastern Iceland monograph. The jury's comments follow: "In 1992 started a large scale archaeological excavation at Hofstaðir near Mývatn, NE-Iceland. The work continued for over a decade. The results have now been presented in a very detailed and elegantly presented monograph. This works offers many new insights into the Viking period in Iceland, the nature of the Settlement and the interplay between man and nature in 9th-11th century Iceland".

New project data added to the system including projects in Greenland, Labrador, the Faroe Island, Scotland and Iceland.

We have created a Project Management System, where NABO projects can be entered by researchers, displayed on a map and content made available to others. Please check out this new feature here or use the projects link above.

If you wish to enter data into the system, you must first register but no registration is needed to search for projects and download data.

Andy Henry as part of his MSc in GIS at the School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh has created an Internet-based GIS using Google Earth. Modern, historical and modelled data from Mývatnssveit (Iceland) are visualised and can be queried using our new VISQUE system. This is a proof of concept to show that Google Earth can used as an Internet GIS. Full details are available at our VISQUE site.

Online Publications

The NABO community is constantly producing material for publication and wider outreach. This ranges from material submitted to peer-reviewed academic journals, books chapters, monographs, excavation reports, laboratory reports, magazine articles and many others. These cover the North Atlantic region and also Barbuda in the Caribbean.

Excavation and laboratory reports appear on this website as soon as they are completed. To access these PDFs please go to the publications section or click one of the most recent additions to the right.

The Kids' Archaeology School (Fornleifaskóli barnanna) was formally established in the spring of 2007 and has since grown in scope and aim.

The Kids archaeology program is now a key part of the Historical Ecology: Islands of Change Initiative, funded in part by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs in the USA. This collaboration allows Icelandic students to interact through organized activities with students in in New York, Greenland, Orkney, Faroes, Norway, Antigua/Barbuda, Curacao and Bonaire.

Details about the Kids' Archaeology School, Iceland can be found on the NABO website and FSÍ's site

The latest report on The Kids Archaeology Program (Fornleifaskóli barnanna) by Sif Jóhannesdóttir and Unnsteinn Ingason is now available.

At the 2009 Viking Congress held in Reykjavik and Reykholt The Institute of Archaeology (Fornleifastofnun Íslands) (FSÍ) made a major donation to the NABO website data project of over 20 years of research amounting to over 300 survey and excavation reports in downloadable pdf format. The first of these reports have now been entered and are available here.

We would like to gratefully acknowledge this generous gift of hard won data by FSÍ to the Icelandic nation and to the international community and we look forward to working with them in the future to provide updates to this impressive body of information.

Barbuda

NABO is not all about the northern North Atlantic. We are also active in the Caribbean. Our work in Barbuda began in 2000 with CUNY archaeologists and an international team of environmental researchers, in collaboration with the Antigua & Barbuda scholars and agencies and by the invitation of Dr. Reg Murphy (head of archaeology for National Parks Antigua and Barbuda). Reports on our work in Barbuda are available here.

Icelander Hreiðar Karlsson (1944-2009) was one of the founders of The Thingey Archaeology Society in 2004 and active member of the board to his death. As well as founder, his was one of the foundations of the society, well known and well regarded in the community. Hreiðar also had interest in new approaches to the preservation of local heritage and 2002 with Unnsteinn Ingason, he started recording the 270 place names with GPS in the land of Narfastaðir farm, where Hreiðar was born. When Hreiðar died, 45 place names were left which sadly will not be gathered as no one is now alive who knows the way to those places. He is much missed by friends and family, but we hope that this commemorative student travel fellowship will serve to carry on the work he began so well.

NABO members have been very active in IPY on the national and international scale, and major funding has been secured from Danish, Canadian, and US sources for an ambitious effort to continue and expand NABO collaboration with a special NABO IPY Project: Long Term Human Ecodynamics in the Norse North Atlantic: cases of sustainability, survival, and collapse. This project is currently funded at just over US$ 900,000 and will have fieldwork seasons 2008-10 in the Shetlands, Faroes, Iceland, and SW Greenland.

More details of our involvement in International Polar Year can be found here.

NABONE 9^th Edition

This recording manual is the 9th working version of the NABO Zooarchaeology Working Group Data Records Project, authorized by the January 1997 working group meeting in New York City. The basic structure follows James Rackham's database (Microsoft Access) with some changes and clarifications for North Atlantic applications

The NABONE system consists of this coding manual, a developed Microsoft Access database with useful queries and reports, and an Excel spreadsheet set providing analytic output similar to the old Hunter College QBONE system.

This recording manual is available here