Climate is commonly invoked as the major force in determining landscape use during the early years of the Norse settlement of Iceland.  In contrast, the later post-settlement period is increasingly understood from excavation and analyses of the material culture associated with farming practices, as well as literature-based and geomorphological perspectives.  While climate evidence provided by regional proxies such as ice-core data interpretation is increasingly and readily available, the linkage from these data to patterns of landscape use and management remains largely speculative based on long-term correlations between climatic shifts and past regional economies.  Such changes typically have multi-decadal timeframes such that the decision making of individual farmers remains unexplored.  In this paper we seek to address this scale and in doing so approach an archaeology of weather. 

A site-specific approach examines homefield areas – areas of intense management – across a set of farm-sites on the Svalbarð estate, North East Iceland with novel high-temporal resolution instrumented analysis of above- and below-ground temperature and moisture conditions.  Using a combination of scaling methods and hindcasting, this study reveals land management practices were used to moderate soil temperatures and hence homefield productivity.  This enables a new view on how past farming communities were able to adapt and to maintain landscape productivities during year-to-year changes in weather patterns.

The Norse that settled in Greenland between c. AD 985-1450 depended greatly on local to regional Arctic marine resources for both subsistence and oversees trade. However, the practical and social organization around this marine economy have only left a limited imprint on the archaeological record, which today appears dominated by evidence of terrestrial farm- and shieling activities. The Winter is Coming Project (WiCP) considers long-term Norse settlement, organization, and land- and sea use in environmentally marginal parts of the Greenland settlements. Initial findings suggest that the Norse living in such areas adjusted their farming and land use strategies to exploit their advantageous access to Arctic marine resources, i.e. becoming “marine farms.” Initially at least, this adaptation appears to have been successful and probably enough to mitigate the first negative effects of the "Little Ice Age" beginning in the 13th century. The study thus aims to outline complex ecodynamics across varying spatiotemporal scales-from single feature to regional settlement patterns-to outline a long-term historical ecology of medieval Norse settlement in Low Arctic Greenland.

The demise of the Norse colonies in Greenland in the 14^th and 15^th centuries have long been debated with most explanations revolving around isolation and harsh environmental conditions. This led to the collapse of the Norse settlement since they were not able to adapt to these environmental changes. The demise of the Norse colonies is most likely more complicated picture and therefore necessary to look at it from more angles. Wood was one of the most important recourses used for housebuilding, boats, tools, vessels and fuel. It has been assumed that the Norse were reliant on import and had inadequate access to wood resources. Until now no systematic research has been carried out to throw light on this matter. Wood assemblages from two sites in Eystribyggð are being identified to get the discussion about wood utilistation on firmer grounds, the episcopal see at Garðar (Igaliku) and middle status farm Ø172 in Vatnahverfi.  Both sites have produced thousands of wooden artefacts, off-cuts, chips and twigs which will support inferences about where the Greenlanders got their wood, whether there was a lack of this resource and how the wood use changed as the climate got colder and harsher. Today climate change is threatening arctic sites with good woord preservationLi and it is quite clear that as climate gets warmer this material group is under great threat. It is therefore necessary to get as much information about wood use before it is too late. 

Central aim of the project is the extraction of marine environmental history data from historical documents and archaeozoological fish remains. The project draws on research undertaken from 2015-2018 within the research project "Between the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea - Interdisciplinary studies of the Hanseatic League" at the German Maritime Museum Bremerhaven. During this project a large amount of historical documents concerned with the 15^th – 17^th century trade of the Hanseatic League with the North Atlantic islands (Iceland, Shetland, Faroes) kept in archives in Northern Europe have been identified, transliterated and made publically available in a database (HansDoc). The documents contain lots of marine environmental history data particularly about Gadidae species, which were subject of the large-scale stockfish trade. Additionally, we aim to mine the evenly extensive historical sources on Hanseatic herring trade. Another focus of the previous Hanse project were fish remains from archaeological sites related to Hanseatic trade. There is now a complete inventory of all Gadidae bones recovered from sites in Germany and these can be used to address further research questions like provenance identification, geographic and diachronic distribution and development patterns, etc. using morphological, osteometrical and biomolecular analyses.

These data will form a valuable part in international research and approaches to reconstruct and restore past marine ecosystems like e.g the History of Marine Animal Populations Project (HMAP), the Oceans Past Initiative (OPI), the Northern Seas Synthesis Project or the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive.