Parent Project: Mývatn Landscapes Project Landscapes of Settlement and Change: Long term human ecodynamics in Mývatnssveit
	Skútustaðir Excavation	Skútustaðir is an active farm and hotel center on the south side of Lake Myvatn. It figures in sagas as the home of "Killer Skuta", an early chieftain, and historically was one of two parish church centers in the Myvatn area and has remained one of the most prosperous farms down to modern times. In 2007 Dr. Arni Einarsson of the nearby Myvatn Science Center noticed animal bones and charcoal eroding from previously unsuspected midden deposits south of the present farm dwellings. Follow up work by collaborating FSI and NABO teams (led by Orri Vesteinsson, Agusta Edwald, Tom McGovern, George Hambrecht, Ian Simpson and Astrid Ogilive) in 2007 and 2008 has revealed a deeply stratified set of midden deposits with excellent organic preservation. Test trenches in 2008 have allowed for collection of ecofacts and artefacts datable by a combination of tephra and AMS C14 from first settlement (cultural deposits are directly upon the AD 871+/-2 Landnám tephra) down to the late 19th c. Analysis is still in preliminary stages and a much larger excavation is planned for 2009-10, but initial results suggest some significant changes in economy through time, including a surprisingly substantial amount of seal bones deposited post-1477 (Skútustaðir is about 60 km from the sea).
	Parent Project: CUNY Strandasysla Historical Ecology Project 1988-90 Strandasysla Historical Ecology Project 1988-90	This project was a joint collaboration between City University of NY (Tom McGovern) and the National Museum of Iceland (Gudmundur Olafsson) with active collaboration by the Icelandic Natural History Institute (Haukur Johanneson)and the kind support of the people of Arneshreppur in Strandasysla, West Fjords, NW Iceland. The project was an early attempt to connect multiple site investigations (aimed at midden sampling rather than structures)into a landscape-focused investigation of changing human use of terrestrial and marine resources. The project involved site survey and location, and the excavation of midden deposits at the sites of Finnbogastadir (early modern deposits sampled), Gjogur (deeply stratified midden extending to early middle ages) and Akurvik (middens and small fishing booth structures dating from mid 13th- late 15th centuries. The region is very rich archaeologically, with generally excellent conditions of organic preservation and very little of the systematic field-flattening that has erased archaeological deposits in other parts of Iceland. Publication of the large Akurvik archaeofauna and the smaller 18th-early 19th c Finnbogastadir archaeofauna is completed and an initial report on the Gjogur materials are available. More work is planned in this region beginning in 2009 (led by Ragnar Edvardsson) and a PhD project (Frank Feeley, CUNY) is planned using the new and 1988-90 archaeofauna. For more information on the old 1988-90 work contact Tom McGovern (nabo@voicenet.com), for information on the new projects contact Ragnar Edvardsson (re@hi.is)
	Finnbogastadir Rescue Excavation 1990	In 1990 construction work around the modern farm house at Finnbogastadir (Arneshreppur, Strandasysla, NW Iceland) hit a stratified midden deposit that produced substantial amounts of well preserved bone and artifacts dating to the 18th to early 19th century. After consultation with the National Museum of Iceland and with the kind permission and active help of the farm family members of the Strandasysla Historical Ecology project worked to recover and document the archaeological deposits disturbed by the construction work. While the farm midden is exceptionally deep and certainly extends further back in time, the 1990 excavations (carried out by then-graduate students Jim Woollett and Sophia Perdikaris) were limited to what was required in this rescue situation, and the materials recovered all seem to relate to the 18th-early 19th c. The Jardabok land survey thus provided closely contemporary historical evidence for the same period, allowing a tentative connection to the two historical households who shared tenantry at Finnbogastadir in the early 18th c. See: Perdikaris, Sophia, Thomas H McGovern, Yekaterina Krivogorskaya, M. Waxman Early Modern Fisher-Farmers at Finnbogastaðir and Gjögur in Northwest Iceland, (2004) R. Gonzales (ed) Presence of the Archaeo- ichthyology in Mexico, ICAZ Fish Remains Working Group 2003, Guadalajara Mexico pp 139-144. Edvardsson, R., Perdikaris, S., McGovern, T. H., Zagor, N. and Waxman, M. (2004) Coping with hard times in North-West Iceland: Zooarchaeology, History, and Landscape Archaeology at Finnbogastaðir in the 18th century’, Archaeologica Islandica 3, 20-48.
	Gjogur Excavations 1990	The site of Gjogur is a substantial farm mound now associated with a small boat landing. Gjogur is historically known to be an early settlement, and the deeply stratified midden deposits sampled in 1990 indicate a long period of occupation. The 1990 season saw a cutting back of a profile exposed by a 1920's silage (surhey) pit, which had exposed over 2 m of stratified midden deposit. Note that the 2009 excavation did not reach the lowest layers due to water flooding and the lowest layers have not been sampled. This site would certainly repay more investigation, and additional lab work continues on the remainder of the 1990 archaeofauna. Gjogur appears as a farm heavily engaged in fishing and fish processing.
	Akurvik Excavations 1990	The site of Akurvik was discovered by Haukur Johanneson in 1987 when beach erosion exposed a series of midden deposits and what proved to be a series of small turf walled booth structures superposed over an 18 m long erosion face at the small embayment at Akurvik at the tip of a rocky peninsula approximately 3 km NE of the Gjogur farm mound. This site was not recorded historically, and seems to have been long abandoned (perhaps due to ongoing uplift making the landing impractical)by the time of the Jardabok survey. The 1990 Strandasysla Historical Ecology project carried out a rescue excavation, cutting back the erosion face to provide a profile and attempting to stablize the exposed deposits. A very large archaeofauna (made up almost entirely of fish bones) was recovered from two major horizons (associated with successive booth structures) dated by radiocarbon to the early and later Middle Ages respectively. The archaeofauna and a summary of the site is published in: Colin Amundsen , Sophia Perdikaris , Thomas H. McGovern , Yekaterina Krivogorskaya , Matthew Brown , Konrad Smiarowski, Shaye Storm, Salena Modugno, Malgorzata Frik, Monica Koczela (2005) ‘Fishing Booths and Fishing Strategies in Medieval Iceland : an Archaeofauna from the of Akurvík, North-West Iceland’, Environmental Archaeology 10,2 : 141-198.
	The Hvalsey Fjord farms - Excavations at the	The ruins at ruin site Ø83a were first recorded and excavated by Aage Roussell in 1935. Originally eight ruins and three cooking pits were recorded. To day four of the ruins have been removed owing to modern cultivation. Roussell's report on the 1935-excavations is very brief and the excavations in 2004 were to look into the state of the remaining ruins and – if possible – to collect material for radiocarbon dating. In 2004 trenches (2 x 4 m) were made in ruin no. 20 (one trench) and ruin no. 22 (three trenches). The excavations in ruin 20 showed that Roussell's 1935-excavations had been comprehensive here and not much was left. It was however possible to conclude that the house had functioned for a short period only. The excavations in ruin 22 revealed a single-phase house with flagged floors. This house too had functioned for a short period only. No material for radiocarbon dating was collected. After his 1935-excavation Roussell concluded that the site had no dwelling and he interpreted the buildings at Ø83a as byres, stables and barns calling the site a "dairy farm" connected to the adjacent high status farm Hvalsey fjord farm and church, ruin site Ø83 (Roussell 1941). House 20 had a byre in the western part of the building and most probably it had a dwelling in the eastern end (see also: Vésteinsson 2008). The ground plan of the houses, the layout of the site and the fact that the houses seem to have been used for at short period suggest that the farm was built at an early stage – most probably at landnam and abandoned shortly after. Two explanations for this early abandonment seem possible 1) that the area was taken over by the nearby high status farm at Hvalsey (Ø83) or 2) the farm Ø83a was a predecessor for the Hvalsey Ø83 farm (Vésteinsson 2005). References Roussell, Aage 1941. Farms and Churches in the Mediaeval Norse Settlements of Greenland. Meddelelser om Grønland vol. 89(1). Copenhagen Vésteinsson, Orri 2008. Archaeological investigations in Hvalseyjarfjörður, Eystribyggð 2005. Fornleifastofnun Íslands. FS388-05301. Reykjavík Jette Arneborg, Fuuja Larsen & Niels-Christian Clemmensen, 2009: The "Dairy Farm" of the Hvalsey Fjord Farm. Journal of the North Atlantic. Selected papers from the Hvalsey Conference 2008. Special Volume 2:24-29 Collaborators Georg Nyegaard, Greenland National Museum & Archives, Nuuk. Then head of Qaqortoq Museum. Fuuja Larsen, Greenland National Museum & Archives, Nuuk Niels-Christian Clemmensen, KUAS, The Heritage Agency of Denmark.
	Parent Project: Gásir Hinterlands Project Study of local subsistence and trans-Atlantic regional trading economy in medieval Iceland	Goal of this project is to gain a better understanding of the interaction of local subsistence and trans-Atlantic regional trading economy in medieval Iceland by collecting faunal materials and other environmental data from deeply stratified middens associated with archaeological sites in Eyjafjörður in the Northeast of Iceland. The Gásir hinterlands project (GHP) aims at the integration of documentary sources, site-focused environmental archaeology, and an integrative regional landscape approach to better understand economic and environmental relationships of farms within the Eyjafjörður region that played an integral part in the food supply and exchange net connected with activities at the Gásir market place.
	Skuggi	Skuggi is an upland small sized farming site in Hörgárdalur, Eyjafjörður and may have been a tenant farm in the earlier Middle Ages, as part of the Staðartunga landholdings. Staðardunga is assumed to have been connected to the medieval monastery at Möðruvellir, situated within 5 km of the medieval trading site at Gásir. As at Oddstaðir, several beads were found in 2009 and were analyzed by Elín Ó. Hreiðarsdóttir. This report and the finds analysis by Guðrún A. Gísladóttir et al. are part of the 2009 GHP Field Report. The report of the 2008 and 2009 faunal analysis is now available.
	Hagrie's Böd	From the early sixteenth century, perhaps even from the second decade of the fifteenth century, ships from north Germany made there way across the north Atlantic to Shetland. The main item of trade for the Hanseatic traders was dried fish which was obtained at the trading places in Norway, Iceland, Faroes as well as the Northern Isles of Scotland and brought back to the northern German ports. The character of this trade has yet to be investigated in detail. Although the bare historical outlines of commerce are known, the details of the interaction between the merchants from northern Germany who spent three, four or five months trading fish with the people of the Northern Isles still remain obscure. The small trading site at Gunnister Voe in Shetland is one of the better documented trading sites. The right to trade at Gunnister Voe was granted to Simon Hagarskale of Hamburg in 1582, but revoked in 1603 because it was said that he had not always come there. This is evidently Simon Harriestede mentioned in Hamburg records as sailing to Shetland until 1625. The trading site can be identified with the place known as Hagrie’s Böd in Gunnister Voe, a rocky promontory projecting into the voe. Immediately behind the promontory is beach with an enclosure which would have been suitable for landing boats bringing dried fish to exchange. The Hamburg ship would have been anchored out in the voe in deeper water. Excavations by Queen’s University and Römisch-Germanische Kommission in September 2008 examined the site and revealed the surviving two walls of the böd or booth. However, deposits below the floor level contained pottery of the 18th or 19th century, suggesting the site had continued in use or, more probably, had been reoccupied when the adjoining crofts at the Setter of Enisferth were established. The building is shown as abandoned on 1881 Ordnance Survey plan, though the remains were evidently clear enough for the surveyors to map them.

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