Hambrecht and Arendt 2009

This special issue of the Journal of the North Atlantic has its origin in the 2006 NABO (North Atlantic Biocultural Organization) conference held at the Université Laval in Québec. One of the central themes of this conference was the early modern period (c.1500-1800 CE). This special issue has gathered a number of papers, some that were presented at the conference and many that were not, which represent some of the work being done in historical/postmedieval archaeology across the North Atlantic today. The regions and approaches of the authors published in this issue reflect the variety and diversity of methodologies and subjects open to Archaeologists working on the early modern North Atlantic. They also illustrate the cultural and ecological diversity of the region itself. The North Atlantic region is, as we define it, the northern-temperate, boreal and sub-arctic areas of North America and Europe that extend from the edge of the Gulf of St Lawrence to the northeast across Labrador and Greenland, Iceland and then touching on the Faroes, the west and north coasts of the British Isles and Ireland, the Shetlands, and finally Northern Norway far above the Arctic Circle. One common theme to this region is the influence of the North Atlantic Drift. This is meant to be a loosely defined region without strict borders highlighting the area’s cultural and environemental interconnectedness. We see two strong possibilities for the development of a theoretical framework that can encompass a subject as vast as early modern North Atlantic archaeology and which the following articles exemplify. First there is the historical ecological/environmental archaeological approach. Second is the work of the Atlantic historians. There has been a great deal of substantial and productive work done in the environmental archaeology of the North Atlantic (for example, McGovern et al. 2007). It is often hard to ignore the environmental variables in this region and a number of contributions in this volume work explicitly within an environmental archaeological approach. We hope that showcasing the unique conditions that North Atlantic post-medieval archaeologists must work within, especially the climatic parameters, will effect the larger practice of historical archaeology throughout the world. The work within this region helps address a void pointed out by a number of scholars, namely the lack of environmental archaeological approaches in historical archaeology (Crumley 1994; Deagan 1996; Mrozowski 2006). A historical ecological approach to the archaeology of this region has had much success in the study of both the medieval European as well as the preColumbian western North Atlantic. This scholarship has demonstrated that such an approach has great potential for the highly inter-connected post-Columbian Atlantic world (Cronon 1983; Crosby 2004; McGovern et al. 2007; Woollett 2007). The potential in the North Atlantic in later time periods is that the high resolution climate proxy data (such as ice and sea cores and tephrochronology) becomes supplemented with the torrent of documents and the refinements in dating and distribution that comes with the huge increase in finds (esp. pottery) in the early modern period. Later historical periods with richer data sets can allow for a historical ecological approach that is not environmentally deterministic, but fully recognizes the multiple interconnections of humans and nature in this critical period of rapid social and environmental change around the world. The interplay of mentalité, perception, class, fashion, technology, heritage, and chance on the conscious and accidental human manipulations of the natural world which certainly extend deep into prehistory can be particularly effectively investigated when documentary sources become common. The post-medieval world of the past five centuries was as impacted by climate change, volcanism, disease, and multi-scalar natural processes as any other portion of the Holocene, and the environmental records (especially high resolution records such as tree rings, varved deposits, and tephra) are particularly abundant and increasingly well studied for this period. Arguably the interactions between humans, climate, plants, animals, soils and landforms saw a dramatic increase in complexity in the post-Columbian world, and there is a growing recognition of the need for an expanded multi-disciplinary investigation of the human ecodynamics of modernity. Such an approach for this period has the potential to examine the interaction of human intention, cognition, and historical sequence on a scale of years and decades as well as centuries and millennia. We hope to place the North Atlantic within the early modern history of the larger Atlantic region, which is often dominated by the middle Atlantic and Caribbean narratives. Though often treated as supplemental in many discussions, the North Atlantic had a central and important role in the creation of the early modern Atlantic world. As Peter Pope‘s volume, Fish Into Wine (2004), so effectively revealed, the cod fishing industry of Newfoundland was one of the earliest and most powerful (in both economic and cultural terms) spurs towards European expansion across the Atlantic. It was a dynamic region where traders, missionaries, farmers, fishermen, whalers, hunters, trappers, Europeans and Native Americans all interacted locally and within larger Oceanic relationships. It contained new colonies, such as Newfoundland, as well as old established early medieval colonies, such as Iceland. This framework offers a new arena to study the effects of the post-Columbian world that contains the classic ‘haunts‘ of the archaeology of the modern world, but often within unique new contexts (Orser 1996). The theoretical and methodological approach is influenced by the Atlantic historians from whom we take the idea that the North Atlantic region is within a larger Atlantic region that has economic and cultural unities but also a conceptual unity. The areas outlining the Atlantic Ocean contributed to the creation of an unique world that was insturmental in the formation of the early modern post-Columbian World and as such is closely connected to the development of modernity. “There is thus a distinguished pedigree for identifying Atlantic history with ‘early‘ modernity, before the onset of industrialization, mass democracy, the nation-state, and all the other classic defining features of full-fledged modernity whose origins both Adam Smith and Karl Marx associated with the European voayges of discovery and especially with 1492.“(Armitage 2002: 12) “The idea of Atlantic history is an emerging formulation which reveals more clearly than we have seen before a transnational, multi-cultural reality that came into existence over a certain passage of years and has persisted. It helps one explain relationships that had not been observed before; it allows one to identify commonalities of experience in diverse circumstances; it isolates unique characteristics that become visible only in comparisons and contrasts; and it provides the outlines of a vast culture area distinctive in world history.“ (Bailyn 2002: xix). Atlantic history recognizes both the conceptual unity of the overall Atlantic region as well as the numerous distinct regions and culures that it comprises. We think this is a particularily inspiring approach to North Atlantic post-medieval Archaeology that can supply a framework for discussion among the disparate regional and methodological approaches represented in this volume. We would like to thank all the authors who have committed to contributing to this volume. As this is an internet journal we chose to have rolling submissions and there will be a number of other articles being uploaded over the next months. We would also like to thank Allison Bain and Jim Wollett, the organizers of the 2006 NABO conference at Laval University in Quebec that served as inspiration for this special issue of JONA. We would also like to thank Dr Thomas McGovern and Dr Sophia Perdikaris for their help and support. This special issue of JONA was greatly assisted, either directly or indirectly, by the generous support of the CUNY Northern Science & Education Center, the UK Leverhulme Trust, and grants (0527732, 0732327, 0352596, 0234383) from the US National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs (Arctic Social Sciences Program), Archaeology Program, International Polar Year Program, and Human and Social Dimensions of Global Change Program, as well as the Icelandic Millennium Fund. This issue is a product of the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) and the International Polar Year 2007-10. References Armitage, David. 2002. Three Concepts of Atlantic History. In The British Atlantic World 15001800, ed. Armitage and Braddick. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bailyn, Bernard. 2002. Preface. In The British Atlantic World 1500-1800, ed. Armitage and Braddick. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the land: Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England. Hill and Wang. Crosby, Alfred W. 2004. Ecological Imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900. New York: Cambridge University Press. Crumley, Carol L. 1994. Historical Ecology: A Multidimensional Ecological Orientation. Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes. ed. Carol L. Crumley: 1-17. Deagan, Kathleen. 1996. Environmental Archaeology and Historical Archaeology. In Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology, ed. Reitz, Newsom, and Scudder. New York: Plenum. McGovern, T. H., O. Vésteinsson, A. Fridriksson, M. Church, I. Lawson, I. Simpson, A. Einarsson, et al. 2007. Landscapes of Settlement in Northern Iceland: Historical Ecology of Human Impact & Climate Fluctuation on the Millennial Scale. American Anthropologist 109, no. 1. Mrozowski, Stephen A. 2006. Environments of History: Biological Dimensions of Historical Archaeology. In Historical Archaeology, ed. Martin Hall. Malden MA: Blackwell. Orser, Charles E. 1996. A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. New York: Plenum Publishing Corporation. Pope, Peter E. 2004. Fish Into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century. University of North Carolina Press. Woollett, James. 2007. Labrador Inuit Subsistence in the Context of Environmental Change: An Initial Landscape History Perspective. American Anthropologist 109, no. 1: 69-84.