Landnám: The Settlement of Iceland in Archaeological and Historical Perspective

Published in "World Archaeology", 1995

The Norse settlement of Iceland established a viable colony on one of the world's last major uninhabited land masses. The vast corpus of indigenous Icelandic traditions about the country's settlement makes it tempting to view this as one of the best case studies of island colonization by a pre-state society. Archaeological research in some ways supports, but in other ways refutes the historical model. Comparison of archaeological data and historical sources provides insights into the process of island colonization and the role of the settlement process in the formation of a culture's identity and ideology.

Ore, Fire, Hammer, Sickle: Iron Production in Viking Age and Early Medieval Iceland

Published in "De Re Metallica: The Uses of Metal in the Middle Ages", AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science and Art, Volume 4, edited by Robert Bork, pp. 183-206. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2004.

Patterns in Time and the Tempo of Change: A North Atlantic Perspective on the Evolution of Complex Societies.

In Continuity or Change: The Role of Analytical Scale in European Archaeology, edited by James Matthieu and Rachel Scott, pp. 83-99.  British Archaeological Reports, International Series, 2005.

Between 1175 and 1250 AD, medieval Icelanders transformed their society from a network of decentralized simple chiefdoms into a unified proto-state. Uniquely, a vast corpus of vernacular writing - much written by the chieftains themselves - describes actors' ideologies, histories, motivations and understandings of the processes involved. Archaeological data provide alternative perspectives, highlighting processes that extended over temporal scales beyond actors' abilities to observe or manage. How robust can our explanatory frameworks be if the changes we seek to explain occur too rapidly to be monitored by most archaeological methods? Do archaeological perspectives provide valuable or illusory insights on the processes involved?

The Spirit of Survival: Cultural Responses to Resource Variability in North Alaska

Co-authored with Leah Minc; published in "Bad Year Economics: Cultural Responses to Risk and Uncertainty", edited by Paul Halstead and John M. O'Shea, pp. 8-39. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (New Directions in Archaeology), 1989.

While the basic structure of responses to scarcity is constrained by the nature of those stresses which coping mechanisms must mediate to be effective, the implementation of coping strategies is predicated on the sociocultural context, which defines the range of organizational and technological options for mediating periods of subsistence stress. In this chapter, we reconstruct the spatio-temporal scales of variability in the major faunal resources of interior and coastal Alaska for the late prehistoric and proto-historic periods from variability in relevant climatic and ecological factors. From the structure of resource variability, we predict the basic structure of coping responses and examine how specific coping strategies were modified over the past 1000 years to adjust to changes in resource structure and sociocultural context.

Outlaws of Surtshellir Cave: The Underground Economy of Viking Age Iceland

Co-authored with Guðmundur Ólafsson and Thomas H. McGovern. Published in "Dynamics of Northern Societies", edited by Jette Arneborg and Bjarni Grønnow, National Museum of Denmark, 2006.