Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2012 - 54

the surrounding ocean. “We are seeing a lot of seal and a lot of ﬁsh bones, also some sheep and a little bit of cow,” says Hébert, pointing to small chunks of bone. A large bone that may have come from a beached whale sticks out of the north wall of the trench. There are also pockets of ockets oyster, clam, and periwinkle shells. Hébert says that until recently Icelanders ate shellﬁsh only under dire circumstances, preferring to use it as bait for ﬁshing. Near the top of the trench’s east wall, Ólafsson points out a gray stripe of volcanic ash that came from the 1477 eruption of a volcanic ﬁssure named Veidivötn. This layer provides an easy way to date the latest part of the midden. The ash shows that the site was occupied i d throughout a period when Icelanders faced one of the greatest challenges to their survival—the Little Ice Age. Currently, an international group of archaeologists is excavating sites across the country in an eﬀort to understand how Icelanders adapted to the colder climate. The project at Hjalmarvik and another excavation at a ﬁshing station in the west called Gufuskálar are revealing how Icelanders changed the way they produced food so that they could survive what turned out to be centuries of long, cold winters. n 1258, somewhere near the equator, a massive volcano erupted, ultimately lowering global temperatures. According to a study coauthored by Penn State University climatologist Michael Mann, average temperatures in the years after the eruption dropped between 3.6 and 4.5 degrees F, or about half as much as temperatures had dropped at the peak of the last major ice age, between 18,000 and 12,000 years
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Whaleb Whalebone carvings are some of the most intriguing artifacts from mos Hjalmar Hjalmarvik. This semicircular carving (left) is a broken disk depicting a mytho mythological animal. Two sides of a bone may possibly show a cross bon (middle) and writing (bottom). (mid

ag ago. A group of scientists at the In Institute of Arctic and Alpine R Research in Colorado have identiﬁed the chain of events that followed the eruption, w which they believe led to the long-term climate change of the Little Ice Age. The chain of events began when volcanoes threw chemical comp pounds called sulfates into the atmosphere. According to Giﬀord Miller, the institute’s associate director and a professor of geology at th University of Colorado t the Boulder, the process continued as sulfates reﬂected sunlight back into space. The resulting lack of sunlight
Cu rre nt

not only dropped the temperature in the atmosphere, it made the surface waters of the ocean colder. The colder ocean produced more sea ice, which spread out from the polar ice caps, cooling waters closer to the equator. In addition, the white surface of the ice reﬂected sunlight, further dropping temperatures. Miller says that although the sulfates would have fallen out of the atmosphere within two to four years, ocean temperatures would have taken 20 or 30 years to rebound. Sulfate levels in ice cores taken from glaciers in Greenland and Iceland show that additional eruptions at volcanoes in the tropics took place in 1268, 1275, and 1285, reinforcing the cooling eﬀect. Because the eﬀects of a changing climate are not felt evenly across the globe, the Little Ice Age began and ended at diﬀerent times in diﬀerent places. According to Miller, it started around 1258 in Iceland and lasted until about 1900.

ven by the standards of a nation on the edge of the Arctic Circle, Hjalmarvik is a cold place. The warm water that

G st Ea

e re

d lan

celandic Irming North I er Cu rren t

Hjalmarvik

Gufuskálar

ICELAND

Irm in ge rC ur r

ent

North Atlantic Drift

Climate and commerce in Iceland have been strongly affected by the ocean currents that surround it. The warm Irminger Current has long kept southern Iceland’s weather relatively mild. It mixes with the cold East Greenland Current on the country’s west coast, providing ideal conditions for cod to spawn. ARCHAEOLOGY • September/October 2012

Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2012