Ramona Harrison

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Bergen

Siglunes is one of a series of endangered sites in N Iceland where we investigate: the emergence and long-term development of Icelandic fisheries and marine mammal hunting, the changing connections between Eyjafjörður and the larger North Atlantic trade and exchange during the Viking Age and medieval times, processes of marine erosion and its effec...

Reykjavík, capital of Iceland, developed from a dispersed rural settlement to nucleated urban community during the last 250 years. Prior to the mid-18th century, Iceland was a rural society that lacked towns or even substantial villages, with seasonal market centers and elite manor farms managing economic activities for widely dispersed farms and s...

The past decade has seen a dramatic expansion of the scope of archaeological and paleoecological work in the islands of the North Atlantic. Supported by major grants from the US, Canada, Scandinavia, UK, and EU sources and coordinated by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization cooperative (NABO), under the International Polar Year initiative an...

The site of Gásir in Eyjafjörður in northeast Iceland was excavated from 2001–2006, revealing details of one of the larger seasonal trading centers of medieval Iceland. Interdisciplinary investigations of the site have shed light upon the organization of the site and provided confi rmation of documentary accounts of both prestige items (gyrfalcons,...

In this chapter, we examine the iconic disappearance of the Medieval Norse Greenlanders and use qualitative scenarios and counterfactual analysis to produce lessons for policymakers. We stress the role that archaeologists and historians have in adding context to contemporary social and environmental challenges and use human-environmental histories...

Species monitoring and conservation is increasingly challenging under current climate change scenarios. For the North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) this challenge is heightened by the added effects of complicated and uncertain past species demography. Right whales once had a much wider distribution across the North Atlantic Ocean, alth...

Stable isotope analyses of zooarchaeological material can be used to examine ecological variability in exploited species at centennial to millennial scales. Climate change is a notable driver of marine ecosystem change, although historical fishing is also likely to have impacted past marine systems. Fishing removes the oldest and largest individual...

Faunal remains from archaeological sites allow for the identification of animal species that enables the better understanding of the relationships between humans and animals, not only from their morphological information, but also from the ancient biomolecules (lipids, proteins, and DNA) preserved in these remains for thousands and even millions of...

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these...

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these...

This article combines new marine fish faunal data from medieval and early modern Icelandic archaeological sites with previously published data that focused primarily on the Settlement and Commonwealth periods. This synthesis places these new data into the larger scale of Icelandic history and marine conditions (sea-surface temperature and sea ice)...

Archaeological records provide a unique source of direct data on long-term human-environment interactions and samples of ecosystems affected by differing degrees of human impact. Distributed long-term datasets from archaeological sites provide a significant contribution to establish local, regional, and continental-scale environmental baselines and...

The Scandinavian Viking Age and Medieval settlements of Iceland and Greenland have been subject to zooarchaeological research for over a century, and have come to represent two classic cases of survival and collapse in the literature of long-term human ecodynamics. The work of the past two decades by multiple projects coordinated through the North...

This book honors the memory of Brian Hesse, a scholar of Near Eastern archaeology, a writer of alliterative and punned publication titles, and an accomplished amateur photographer. Hesse specialized in zooarchaeology, but he influenced a wider range of excavators and ancient historians with his broad interpretive reach. He spent much of his career...

The offshore islands of the North Atlantic were among some of the last settled places on earth, with humans reaching the Faroes and Iceland in the late Iron Age and Viking period. While older accounts emphasizing deforestation and soil erosion have presented this story of island colonization as yet another social–ecological disaster, recent archaeo...

Walrus-tusk ivory and walrus-hide rope were highly desired goods in Viking Age north-west Europe. New finds of walrus bone and ivory in early Viking Age contexts in Iceland are concentrated in the south-west, and suggest extensive exploitation of nearby walrus for meat, hide and ivory during the first century of settlement. In Greenland, archaeofau...

The Siglunes site encompasses a Settlement Era (ca. AD 871) farm mound located on mainland and a series of eroding fishing structures found along the southern and western coasts of the peninsula protruding to the west from the mainland area. The site may have been occupied continuously through the post-medieval period and the last permanent Siglune...

In summer of 2008 and 2009, the Gásir Hinterlands Project investigated the potential for midden remains at Myrkárdalur, a farm ruin site situated in a highland area in the most interior part of a minor valley system in Hörgárdalur, Eyjafjörður. The results of these exercises were two small collections of archaeological materials from two middens of...

This paper provides archaeological data from a midden excavation that was part of the Gásir Hinterlands Project carried out in 2008-09. Spatial and temporal data on this small scale inland farm is presented and especially the results from the faunal but also the finds analyses are discussed. Skuggi was probably never an independent farm but rather...

In 2009, an international team cooperated in survey, coring, and small scale test excavation work on selected sites in the Eyjafjord region in North Iceland. This concluded the initial part of the Gásir Hinterlands Project which was predominantly funded by a NSF IPY Dissertation Improvement Grant. A thorough account on the field season and artifact...

This was the first season of a planned multi-season collaborative investigation of the hinterlands surrounding the medieval seasonal trading center at Gásir. Prior work at Gásir indicated that this trading center was provisioned from a wide economic catchment area and that investigations needed to be extended to include the surrounding landscape. T...

In 2007, midden deposits associated with the 9 th-19 th c. archaeological site of Skutustadir in the Lake Myvatn District of N. Iceland were located. The remains were first noted by Arni Einarsson of the Myvatn Science Station and later, more extensively surveyed by CUNY archaeologists. In 2008, an international team lead by CUNY and FSI excavated...

This paper reports on the zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical remains from the initial season of excavations at the Norse period site at Undir Junkarinsfløtti in the Faroe islands. These remains represent the first zooarchaeological analysis undertaken for the Faroes and only the third archaeobotanical assemblage published from the islands. The...

This paper reports on the zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical remains from the first season of excavations at the Norse period site at Undir Junakarinsfløtti in the Faroe islands. These remains represent the first zooarchaeological analysis undertaken for the Faroes and only the third archaeobotanical assemblage published from the islands. The e...

Cooperative international excavations at the site of Un dir Junkarinsfløt ti (27020) in the village of Sandur on the island of Sandoy, Faroe Islands in May 2003 recovered a stratified bone - rich midden deposit extending from the Viking Age to the early medieval period. The animal bone collection contains domestic mammals (cattle, sheep, dog, goat,...