1980 — 1981 |
Mcgovern, Thomas |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Greenland Landsmuseum Archaeological Survey |
0.818 |
1981 — 1983 |
Mcgovern, Thomas |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Doctoral Dissertation Research in Anthropology @ Cuny Graduate School University Center |
0.852 |
1984 — 1986 |
Bigelow, Gerald Mcgovern, Thomas |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Sandnes Archaeological Project |
0.818 |
1988 — 1992 |
Mcgovern, Thomas |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Icelandic Paleoeconomy Project
Dr. McGovern and his colleagues will continue to conduct archaeological excavations at the large and deeply stratified farm midden site of Svalbard and other related sites in Iceland. Adopting a broad scale approach, he will uncover the outlines of homestead buildings and through the recovery of faunal, floral, and other artifactual remains, study the subsistence adaptation of Norse inhabitants of Iceland. He will supplement these data with ethnographic and documentary research and employ paleoenvironmental data to reconstruct adaptation against a backdrop of changing environmental conditions. Between 800.1000 AD, Viking.age Scandinavian populations spread into the islands of the North Atlantic taking with them a well developed seafaring tradition and a subsistence economy based upon domestic animals and some cereals. As they moved into new regions they adapted this to include wild resources which were readily available. Archaeology in Iceland can shed light on this adaptive process and is especially interesting because it provides insight into how human populations cope in marginal environments. Beginning ca. 1250 AD a significant climatic cooling known as the "Little Ice Age" began. This affected the Viking colonies and placed great stress on local populations. The Svalbard site is particularly interesting because it documents this period and the data which Dr. McGovern recovers will provide insight into how human populations adapt to severe climatic stress. Because faunal and floral material is so well preserved, detailed subsistence reconstruction will be possible.
|
0.818 |
1993 — 1998 |
Mcgovern, Thomas Amorosi, Thomas |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
North Atlantic Biocultural Coordination and Research Project
Scandinavian settlers colonized the islands of the North Atlantic 500 years before Columbus. They introduced European economies and culture into fragile Arctic terrestrial and marine ecosystems and over time suffered the consequences of ecological damage, human population decreases and extinctions. The Nordic archaeological, historical and ecological data on these human impacts is unique in the circumpolar world and highly relevant to our understanding of global change. This five year project seeks to coordinate, integrate and, through case studies, analyze the complex multi- disciplinary data from the North Atlantic region. This effort will greatly enhance the value of individual research projects in 10 countries, and is of direct relevance to applied studies of fisheries and agriculture in the north.
|
0.818 |
1995 — 1997 |
Conant, Francis Szalay, Frederick Mcgovern, Thomas (co-PI) Parry, William Bromage, Timothy |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Acquisition of Integrated Imaging and Image Analysis Equipment For the Archaeology, Cultural and Biological Anthropology Programs At Hunter College, Cuny
With partial support from the National Science Foundation, the Anthropology Department of Hunter College, CUNY, will purchase an image analysis system including a Leica Steroscan 440 Scanning Electron Microscope, a Leica Q600 HR Image Analysis System, a Leica-Leitz DMRX/E Universal Microscope and a Leica-Wild Stereo Microscope. This equipment will permit evolutionary, ecological, functional and adaptational research on the biology and culture of living and fossil human populations, as well as the ecology and evolutionary biology of living and fossil nonhuman primates. Many of the projects to be conducted look at the microscopic structure of bone and the morphological data thus collected will allow investigators to address a number of questions. These will provide insight into: facial development variation and the origins of anatomically modern humans; the effects of brain development and other factors on primate facial form; the adaptive morphology of African great apes; the microstructure of osteological landmarks and their correlation with mechanical function and biological role; collagen fiber orientation and the biomechanics of bone. Taken together these projects will increase understanding of how the form of bones relates to the functions they perform and will permit paleoanthropologists to reconstruct the morphology and behavior of extinct animals based on the analysis of fossil bones. A second major area of research falls within the scope of archaeology. Scientists will use this equipment to examine microscopic scratches on stone tools and determine the functions these implements served. They will also allow faunal analysts to determine the seasons during which prey animals were killed and to reconstruct the hunting strategies of prehistoric peoples. The equipment will be widely used by graduate and undergraduate students for teaching and research purposes and by scientists from other institutions in the New York City area.
|
0.818 |
1996 — 2000 |
Mcgovern, Thomas Amorosi, Thomas |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Historical Dimensions of Sustainability in the N. Atlantic Ca. 2,000 Bp- Present
ABSTRACT OPP-9523519 McGovern/Amorosi/Ogilvie This proposal is for support of an interdisciplinary, international research group studying human/environmental interactions over the past 2000 years in the North Atlantic region. The North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) has developed a network of researchers from over 40 organizations and ten nations. Operating under the theoretical orientation of historical ecology, NABO workers are integrating historical, archaeological and ethnographic data with recent paleoenvironmental data derived from ice-cores, pollen analysis, bones, insects and other sources. The overarching goal is to develop an integrated analytical approach to complex problems of climate impact on humans, human impacts on the environment, and the environmental effects of humans' interactions with each other. Systematic working meetings are needed to advance US and international human dimensions of global change research.
|
0.818 |
2000 — 2003 |
Mcgovern, Thomas (co-PI) Perdikaris, Sophia [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Reu: Northern Science and Education Program
Abstract: OPP-9912332 Perdikaris, McGovern CUNY Brooklyn College
This Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site provides an opportunity for U.S. urban students to participate in laboratory and field research in international, interdisciplinary northern science. The project incorporates hands-on work in zooarchaeology and historical ecology through an archaeological field school in northern Iceland. The City University of New York's Northern Science and Education Center, based at Brooklyn College, will have primary oversight, review, and administration responsibilities, while other participating institutions include the Hunter College Bioarchaeology Laboratory and Anthropology Department, the Brooklyn Archaeological Institute, the Brooklyn Bioarchaeological Laboratory, the Graduate Center of the City University, the Stefansson Arctic Center, the Archaeological Institute of Iceland, the Myvatn Science and Conservation Center, and the Geography Department of the University of Edinburgh. Fieldwork will center on the lake Myvatn area of northern Iceland, where a cooperative field school has been held since 1996.
|
0.815 |
2000 — 2004 |
Dugmore, Andrew Simpson, Ian Mcgovern, Thomas Vesteinsson, Orri |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Landscapes of Settlement: Historical Ecology in Northern Iceland
With National Science Foundation support Dr. Thomas McGovern and his colleagues will conduct three seasons of archaeological investigation at the site of Hofstadir, a medieval settlement in Iceland. First excavated in 1908, researchers uncovered a large hall structure with a central long fireplace and side benches and postulated it functioned as a temple. More recent work which has further uncovered the building and located a series of surrounding house sites indicates that the complex has a complicated occupational history and likely was primarily a full scale high status farmstead. Dr. McGovern will direct additional research at this site to understand how its function changed over time and how its occupants derived their sustenance from and in turn influenced the environment. They will conduct extensive horizontal excavation and combine this with extensive survey and test-pitting of satellite sites and fields within the farm. They will also sample sites and features in the broader region. Iceland was first settled by humans from Scandinavia and the British Isles during the Viking age and extensive contemporary literature describes the latter stages of this occupation. This documentary record (sagas, law codes, annals) provides rich evidence for a socially complex non-state society. These writings have been employed by historians and anthropologists for studies of Iceland and the development of general theories of chieftainship. However, although the early settlement period is described in sagas and other later accounts, all these documents date to after AD 1100 and are clearly secondary sources much influenced by medieval rather than Viking period social and economic contexts. The first 225 years are, in effect, prehistoric and thus can be understood only through systematic archaeological and paleoecological investigation. Dr. McGovern's research will help to accomplish this goal.
The work will shed important new light on human environment interactions and the effect of human behavior on island ecosystems. Human impact on local animals, vegetation, soils and drainage patterns was rapid and profound. By 950 AD ca 80% of the native scrub woodlands had been cleared and soil erosion had begun in the higher elevations. By the later Middle Ages, accelerated loss of groundcover led to more widespread erosion of ca 40% of the topsoil present before human settlement and massive alteration of river drainage patterns. Iceland thus represents an extreme case of pre-industrial human impact on the environment and provides an excellent laboratory to understand such interactions.
|
0.818 |
2003 — 2004 |
Mcgovern, Thomas |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
The Development of Fishing and Fishing Communities in the Northwest of Iceland: Labor, Nature and Social Change in a Medieval Society - Doctoral Improvement Grant
0322308 McGovern This is a Dissertation Proposal by Dr. Thomas McGovern for Ragnar Edvardsson, CUNY Hunter College, to do ethnohistoric and archaeological research on Northwestern Icelandic fishing sites from the Medieval period. The proposed research will shed light on a very important period in Icelandic history, the development of commercial fisheries. Utilizing data from the archaeological record the PI hypothesizes a more dynamic interaction between society and nature than previously described in Iceland from analyses of the historic record alone. This research potentially could provide deeper insight into 13th century societal influences on fish stocks that could have implications for contemporary fisheries management worldwide.
|
0.818 |
2003 — 2006 |
Mcgovern, Thomas (co-PI) Perdikaris, Sophia [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Northern Science and Education
This research proposal, The Northern Science Education REU Site, by Dr. Sofia Perdikaris and Dr. Thomas McGovern, builds on a previous proposal funded through ASSP for 2000-2003. For the past three years the Northern Research and Education Program has involved inner city undergraduates, including underrepresented minority students and women (64% of total participants), and graduate students in a multi-discipline, northern field school and laboratory located in Iceland. The program includes intensive participation in archaeological field work and environmental science in Iceland in the summer followed by workshops, coursework, and internships at the American Museum of Natural History. The program is an exemplary REU site giving undergraduates a full compliment of science education and experience within which to develop their own projects and interests in science.
|
0.815 |
2004 — 2009 |
Mcgovern, Thomas Perdikaris, Sophia (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Zooarchaeology & Human Ecodynamics in Northern Iceland and Faroe Islands
This research project supports multi-disciplinary research in Iceland and the Faroe Islands focusing on the ecological impacts of first human settlement and the theoretical insights this gives into global climate processes and social, political and economic change. Focusing on zooarchaeology, complemented by historical, ethnographic, and ecological research, the project proposes to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between the social and ecological factors shaping the current island landscape. Building on prior research, the PI and CoPI continue to test their understanding the complex relationships between humans and their environment.
|
0.818 |
2006 — 2011 |
Simpson, Ian (co-PI) [⬀] Ingimundarson, Jon Mcgovern, Thomas (co-PI) Ogilvie, Astrid |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Hsd: Human and Social Dynamics in Myvatnssveit, Iceland, From the Settlement to the Present @ University of Colorado At Boulder
Increasing attention in recent years has focused on trying to better understand the complex interactions through which humans (individually and as members of formal and informal groups) interact with the many different biophysical systems that collectively constitute their natural environment. Studies of longer-term human-environmental interaction often have been hampered by a paucity of data and information about human activities that can be related to longer-term natural system databases. This interdisciplinary and international project will consider the interaction of human societies with their surroundings; specifically with climate and ecosystems, within the context of economic and social constraints. The overarching goal of the project is to foster breakthroughs in understanding the dynamics of human action and development, as well as knowledge about organizational, cultural, and societal adaptation and change. Further specific goals involve the explanation of changes in economic practices in the Myvatn area of northern Iceland from early settlement times (about AD 870 onwards) to the present. Three major economic and ecological transitions have been identified in the area: one from about 1150 to 1200; a second in the 1880s; and a third from about 1990 to the present. Each transition involved both local and global climatic and economic factors, and each produced successive cascades of change in vegetation, soil, land holding, and settlement locations. Drawing on information from the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities, this project will benefit from the expertise of local informants in the community, as well as on a wealth of highly detailed documentary records of social and economic change, both historical and contemporary, and an extensive archaeological record. Several different databases will be compiled and analyzed, including environmental and climate data, soils- and sediment-based cultural records, and present-day agronomic, socioeconomic, and population records. The investigators will use an innovative approach for integrating archaeological, historical, and environmental strands of evidence through modeling. The project also will make use of systems theory in order to focus on agents of change in social-ecological systems. This synergistic research approach is expected to result in a detailed analysis of how the economic growth and social development of a society, in this case in northern Iceland, is influenced by its eco-systemic links and socioeconomic institutions.
This project will take advantage of long-term databases that have been collected regarding both society and the local environment in the Myvatn area over the 1,100-year period when people have lived in the region. The project will provide new insights into the dynamics of dramatic changes in the region, including almost-complete deforestation, massive soil erosion, and repeated cycles of starvation and abandonment as well as examples of long periods of successful management of land and natural resources by the local population. This study is expected to help identify factors that produced long-term sustainable farming in some localities and irreversible soil erosion in others. The project will contribute to understanding of the complex webs of interaction between present and future environmental changes, and the physical and cultural landscape. Because significant climatic change is anticipated in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, rapid social and environmental change is anticipated in the Myvatn region and in many other parts of the world in coming decades. Few guidelines exist for promoting genuinely sustainable strategies for community development and survival. Studies like this that include long-term perspectives will help to identify policies and behaviors that are likely to promote (or reduce) resilience and sustainable resource use. An award resulting from the FY 2005 NSF-wide competition on Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) supports this project. All NSF directorates and offices are involved in the coordinated management of the HSD competition and the portfolio of HSD awards.
|
0.866 |
2007 — 2011 |
Mcgovern, Thomas |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Ipy: Long Term Human Ecodynamics in the Norse North Atlantic: Cases of Sustainability, Survival, and Collapse.
IPY: Long Term Human Ecodynamics in the Norse North Atlantic: cases of sustainability, survival, and collapse.
Why do societies succeed or fail when confronted with climate change, culture contact, and the unexpected outcomes of long term human impact upon landscape and resources? North Atlantic provides some unique case studies for the collaborative, cross-disciplinary study of these fundamental questions. Just over 1000 years ago, a wave of Viking-Age Scandinavian colonization brought a common culture, language, and set of economic strategies from Norway to Newfoundland. By 1800, these once uniform island communities had experienced radically different fates: the Greenland colony was totally extinct, Icelanders were barely surviving in a heavily eroded landscape, and the Faroese were continuing a stable and successfully sustainable thousand year long adaptation with apparently little erosion or population loss. These contrasting case studies provide the focus for an international, interdisciplinary project that makes use of the International Polar Year (IPY) initiative to bring together scholars, students, and local community members from Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands in a cooperative effort to; 1) Understand the complex dynamics of human-environment interaction on the millennial scale, human impact on island flora, fauna, and soils, sustainable and unsustainable resource use, the impacts of climate change, interactions between subsistence and exchange economies; 2) Collect and analyze directly comparable data sets (artifacts, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, geoarchaeology) from coordinated regional-scale excavations taking place on all three islands as an IPY surge activity, sharing gear, specialists, and excavation staff for inter-comparability, 3) Involve local communities in the research effort and aid them in making inter-island connections which will aid their own outreach efforts, 4) Engage US and international students at high school, undergraduate, and graduate level in fieldwork and in the development of K-12 classroom materials.
|
0.818 |
2008 — 2010 |
Mcgovern, Thomas |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Dissertation Improvement Grant Gasir Hinterlands Project
This Dissertation Improvement Grant, investigator Ramona Harrison/PI Thomas McGovern, proposes to examine local production and imported trade items during the medieval period in Iceland through zooarchaeological investigations that will connect data to a larger environmental archaeology project, the Gasir Hinterlands Project. The larger Gasir project is a highly integrated, interdisciplinary environmental archaeology project to gain insights into social, cultural, material and environmental change in medieval Iceland. Ramona Harrison will be responsible for the excavation and analysis of archaeofauna from four medieval Icelandic sites in order to gain insight into the resilience stategies of local social groups and their adaptations to climate perturbations.
|
0.818 |
2009 — 2013 |
Mcgovern, Thomas (co-PI) Perdikaris, Sophia [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Reu Site: Islands of Change
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The mission of this collaborative international REU is to engage New York City undergraduates in cutting-edge investigations of past and present global change through fieldwork in two very different Atlantic islands combined with intensive coursework, seminars, and laboratory research at CUNY and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The island research at the core of this project presents strong contrasts in scale, history, ethnicity, and natural environment which will provide students with varied and stimulating comparative experiences, but common themes and processes connect these islands in both past and present.
For the Islands of Change program, a combination of graduate level course work, intensive lab participation, formal and informal education on the practice and culture of interdisciplinary science, intensive seminar visits by international scholars, distance learning, well supervised and carefully prepared field experiences, will be provided to a diverse group of undergraduates. This project has a strong commitment to peer-mentoring and hands on learning.
Participation in the Islands of Change REU will provide students with skills and immersive experiences to jump start careers in science, broaden their understanding of both human and natural dimensions of rapid global change. This project will reach beyond the student participants by engaging them in the vital work of communicating scientific results to the wider public through outreach and education both abroad and in the Discovery Room at AMNH . The Islands of Change program will work to connect local and global educational efforts with exciting new field science to provide lasting benefits to local communities as well as CUNY students.
The islands today are faced by challenges associated with rapid global change- climate change, sea level rise, changes in plant and animal life, and the social and economic disruptions caused by dramatic shifts in world economy. They also share histories of external colonization, local adaptation, human impacts on landscape and resources, and changing impacts of past global economic connections. These islands are products of complex historical interactions which affect their potential for future sustainability and face common twenty first century challenges of educating citizens and nurturing young scientists with strong social commitment.
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0.815 |
2009 — 2010 |
Mcgovern, Thomas Ogilvie, Astrid Perdikaris, Sophia (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Conference On Global Long Term Human Ecodyamics
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This funding will provide support for a workshop to take place at the Research Institute at Eagle Hill Maine, October 15-18th 2009, to bring together over 40 leading scientists (archaeologists, social historians, ethnologists, modelers, and climate scientists) who have for decades been researching the long term interactions between human social/cultural systems and environmental systems. One of the key goals of the workshop is to piece together a global picture of long term climate change and the effects on local social systems. As the PI Thomas McGovern describes it, the objective of the workshop is to connect the many excellent regional research areas with their interdisciplinary teams, case specific models, digital tools and rich data sets, into a genuinely global network that can produce a "transformative upgrade" in the collective scientific understanding of human interactions with local and regional environments, informed by a well integrated long-term perspective on processes and outcomes operation on the annual, decadal, and millennial scale.
The organizing team of McGovern, Perdikaris, and Ogilvie have been researching North Atlantic climate and its influence on Norse social/cultural changes. Through this workshop, the North Atlantic research team will connect their perspectives with the perspectives of colleagues working in South America, Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, Oceania, SW US, Caribbean, North Pacific, and the Arctic in order to create a synergy of research and analyses on a global scale. It is not expected that this workshop will create a definitive statement on human/environmental interactions, but rather will catalyze new perspectives - global perspectives - on research that has been important to creating regional understandings of human adaptation to and interaction with environmental change.
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0.818 |
2011 — 2017 |
Mcgovern, Thomas (co-PI) Kohler, Timothy Nelson, Margaret (co-PI) [⬀] Fitzhugh, Ben (co-PI) [⬀] Perdikaris, Sophia [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Rcn - Sees Global Long-Term Human Ecodynamics Research Coordination Network: Assessing Sustainability On the Millennial Scale @ Cuny Graduate School University Center
This Research Coordination Network grant brings together and international, multi-disciplinary team of scientists and educators to better mobilize cases of long term human ecodynamics on the century to millennial scale to aid national and global efforts to develop effective future sustainable development and to create resources for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). This RCN project will develop a collaborative research network that will identify conditions that allow people to develop sustainable relationships with the environment over the millennial scale or have led to unsustainable outcomes. This proposal draws upon widespread recognition that inter-generational sustainability education efforts and formulation of long-term environmental policy for adaptive management are ill served by short observational spans, restricted case pools, and disciplinary stove-piping. This RCN will promote development of a transdisciplinary millennial scale perspective for a genuinely sustainable future through three interlinked working teams; 1) building capacity in long-term sustainability investigations through systematic inter-regional comparison of cases representing long-term human ecodynamics ?experiments? of coupled natural and human systems impacted by climate change, multi-generational human impact, and inter-regional connection; 2) building cyberinfrastructure support through common data management, digital dissemination and visualization tools that both aid sustainability researchers and connect with sustainability educators; 3) Enhancing local and national initiatives in sustainability education and community involvement in global change science by innovative application of digital technology and creating direct links with education professionals and involving active local community participation in sustainability science & education.
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0.852 |
2011 — 2014 |
Mcgovern, Thomas (co-PI) Nelson, Margaret [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Resilience and Vulnerability to Climate Change: a Collaboration Between Nabo and Ltvtp @ Arizona State University
Vulnerability to climate change is a pressing policy issue at local, state, national, and global scales. Public and private organizations, policy makers, and resource managers are concerned with how communities at these scales can adjust to climate change and an increasingly uncertain future. With the future inherently unknowable and policies derived from understandings based on narrow windows of time and space, management for "long-term sustainability" is a daunting task. Archaeology has a strong contribution to make to climate-change policy because it investigates long sequences of social and climate change at multiple scales. In essence, the sequences of changes in human-landscape-climate interactions represent examples of outcomes that can help to think about the impacts of climate change.
This proposal requests funds to initiate a Research Collaboration Network involving two research teams - the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) in the circumpolar North Atlantic region and Long-Term Vulnerability and Transformation Project (LTVTP) in the arid and semi-arid deserts of the southwestern US and northern Mexico. Each team investigates the relationship between climate change and social change in extremely different settings and over many centuries. This proposed work will address 1) how rigidity of social systems influences adjustments to climate change and 2) whether infrequent climate changes (outside of human memory) are more impactful than frequent changes. The teams request funding to support initiation of a Research Collaboration Network involving archaeologists, modelers, climate scientists, and experts on sustainability from NABO and LTVTP, who will synthesize archaeologically known sequences in ways that are relevant both to archaeology and current policy.
This research will address the impacts of social responses to climate change, an issue central to contemporary policy and relevant to public and private organizations, policy makers, and resource managers interested in promoting resilience to climate change. The comparative work, engaging long sequences from contrasting regions of the world, will expand knowledge beyond the short-term and the regionally specific. Research results will synthesize resilience and vulnerability over the long term. This synthesis will include understanding of the social processes of rigidity and path dependence that affect human impacts on environmental conditions and human responses to climate change. The proposed project represents the first collaboration within the new Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance. The archived data will provide a permanent resource of long-term climate, social, and demographic data for a range of scientists. The research collaborations will include a range of students, offering them a unique, cross-regional and interdisciplinary educational experience.
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0.854 |
2012 — 2014 |
Mcgovern, Thomas |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Rapid Gardar Collaborative Rescue Project @ Cuny Graduate School University Center
This RAPID award will support an intensive international multi-disciplinary effort to salvage critical organic remains from rapidly degrading cultural deposits at the unique site of Gardar E47 at modern Igaliku in the former Norse Eastern Settlement in Greenland. This site is unique in that it represents a church and manor farm from the 11th century, was the administrative and religious center for the first settlement of the Norse in Greenland, and remained thus until the extinction of the Norse ca 1450. As such, the Gardar site has the potential to provide unique insights into the changing structure and organization of Norse Greenland and its society response to climate change and culture contact at this time period.
The site at Gardar is very rich in archaeofauna, which is the source of concern and the reason for this RAPID proposal. When Gardar was assessed as part of an IPY project on how climate change was affecting cultural resources in the Arctic, it was highlighted as a highly endangered site. As recently as 1981 the site was shown to have great preservation of organic materials; unfortunately, the previously favorable conditions are rapidly changing due to changing climate conditions in the Arctic. The decrease in frozen ground is creating an unidentifiable ?bone mush? out of much of the previously well preserved organic materials at the site. In addition to the changing environmental conditions, the local farmers have been cutting deep drainage ditches into the meadows surrounding the site in order to drain off the now standing water. These ditches have further destabilized the site exposing it to further melting and destruction of organic data. The site has been nominated by the Government of Greenland as a UN World Heritage Site because of its unique contribution to the cultural history of modern Greenland, making the threatened data and the scientific analyses and insights that could be gained all the more important.
The field team has three objectives for the 2012 season: to 1) carry out an intensive season of rescue excavation and site documentation of the most endangered deposits; 2) ensure effective post-excavation curation and analysis of the rescued materials; and 3) leave the Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaaterqarfial/The Greenland National Museum & Archives (NKA) with an accurate digital site map and geophysical prospection results they will need to effectively manage this nominated World heritage site for the benefit o f the Greenlandic community.
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0.852 |
2012 — 2014 |
Mcgovern, Thomas Hicks, Megan |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Doctoral Dissertation Research: Centennial Scale Human Ecodynamics At Skutustadir Iceland @ Cuny Graduate School University Center
This research project, will support the PhD research of doctoral student M. Hicks under the supervision of Dr. T. McGovern. The project Centennial Scale Human Ecodynamics at Skútustaðir will contribute to the understanding of long-term economic and ecological practices in N. Iceland by examining the archaeological record of a district-center farm, Skútustaðir, first settled during Iceland's initial settlement period (871-950 CE) and occupied through to the present. During this farm's long history, inhabitants experienced economic consolidation, colonialism, changes in land tenure and land use in addition to fluctuations in their natural environment including climactic change and soil depletion. These factors interacted directly with subsistence practices (McGovern et al. 2007, McGovern et al. 2006). Long term sites such as Skútustaðir would have been the social and economic backbone of their regions. Their study is crucial to generating the long term picture of settlement history, ecological history and social history in this region though time. Theoretical foundations of this research include Historical Ecology in archaeology as laid out by Carole Crumley (1994) with its concern for historical context and emphasis on long term investigations of landscapes changing through time while dialectically influenced by human activity. The project's main method is zooarchaeology which is particularly relevant in Iceland as the vast majority of dietary subsistence and economic transactions were based on animal products. The proposed field research includes the excavation of additional zooarchaeological material (animal bones) as evidence of subsistence practices from the middle ages to complete the chronology of this long term site. The research proposed includes the analysis of dated samples of eggshell already excavated- evidence of a sustainable long term tradition of egg harvesting at Skútustaðir a tradition with social and ecological dimensions in the most diverse waterfowl habitat on earth (Lake Mývatn). Archival work proposed will provide a rich social context for archaeological remains.
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0.852 |
2012 — 2017 |
Hambrecht, George [⬀] Mcgovern, Thomas (co-PI) |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Comparative Island Ecodynamics in the North Atlantic @ University of Maryland College Park
The proposed project seeks to improve scientific understanding of the complex interactions of human governance, climate change, human environmental impact, and world system effects on the diverging fates of two closely related Scandinavian communities in Greenland and Iceland. While the Icelanders survived centuries of adverse climate, volcanic eruptions, large-scale soil erosion, epidemic disease, and harsh world-system economic impacts to develop a modern society now ranking high in international assessments of quality of life, their relatives in Norse Greenland suffered complete extinction by the mid-15th century CE. Why did one northern community achieve sustainability on the millennial scale, while its near neighbor underwent genuine social-environmental system (SES) collapse despite centuries of successful adaptation and what we now recognize as comparatively resilient economic management? How can the lessons of these thousand year cases of long term human ecodynamics and their radically different outcomes be more effectively understood and interpreted for the wider effort to mobilize the past to serve modern efforts to secure a genuinely sustainable future? What lessons of survival and extinction can be learned and taught for both local northern community heritage and for global education for sustainability? These questions are not only relevant to Norse in the 14th -15th centuries but have the potential to inform research that can provide insights into social decisions that are key to the long-term sustainability of human and environmental systems on earth. The project combines the data and expertise of history, human bioarchaeology, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, geoarchaeology, artifact distribution, stable isotopic analysis, geochronology, environmental modeling, and K-12 and college education professionals. It brings together teams of scientists, educators, and local residents from across the region and create genuinely transdisciplinary and genuinely transformative approaches to shared problems of human survival and sustainable adaptation in the north.
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0.863 |
2013 — 2015 |
Mcgovern, Thomas |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Doctoral Dissertation Research: Maritime Adaptations and Early North Atlantic Fisheries At Gufusk?Lar Iceland @ Cuny Graduate School University Center
This award supports a Dissertation Improvement Grant for doctoral student Frank Feeley. Researcher Feeley will be working closely with PI Tom McGovern to explore the site of Gufuskálar in western Iceland. This dissertation improvement grant will support two seasons of archaeological investigation of the site in order to better understand its role in the early "global" economy of Icleand, as well as the origins of the modern world economic system. The site of Gufuskálar is important as it's one of the few surviving examples of the handful of large medieval fishing stations. These stations marked Iceland's introduction into the growing world system of medieval trade, which is the basis for our modern world economic system. The investigation will use a unique methodology of examinining fish crania to determine the movement from subsistence to commodity fisheries in Iceland during the Viking period. In addition, both sea and wind are quickly eroding the site, which is one of the largest medieval fishing stations in Iceland. This project will contribute to the preservation of information in danger of being lost and will contribute to the preservation of this important site itself.
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0.852 |
2013 — 2016 |
Dugmore, Andrew Mcgovern, Thomas (co-PI) |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Tephra Layers and Early Warning Signals For Critical Transitions @ Cuny Graduate School University Center
This project seeks to develop new measures of land surface resilience through a novel study of layers of volcanic ash (tephra). Changes in vegetation patterns are known to indicate changing land surface resilience and indicate proximity to threshold change. The morphology of cm-scale thicknesses of tephra is shaped by the pre-existing vegetation cover, in particular its depth, density, extent or patchiness. Thus, when tephra deposition is of a similar depth to the height of the pre-existing vegetation, tephra layer morphology can be used to assess relative land surface resilience at the time of tephra deposition. The researchers aim to develop new measures of resilience firstly through study of tephra layers created by recent Icelandic eruptions- the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull and the 2011 eruption of Grímsvötn. Secondly, they will apply the new understandings gained from the study of very recent ash falls to the natural archive presented by the numerous past tephra layers preserved within the soil. Measures of land surface resilience and indications of proximity to threshold-crossing could make important contributions to understanding the interplay of changes driven by people and by the environment, and to the evolving field of sustainability science. In southern Iceland up to 21 tephra layers have been deposited since the Norse settlement, and these layers are clearly separated by intervening layers of aeolian sediment. We know that landscapes in these areas have been subject to directional drivers of change (such as falling temperatures and increasing grazing pressures) that have pushed land surfaces close to, and at times across, tipping points between one persistent state and another. Knowledge of ?near misses? in the past derived from novel uses of tephra layers could help us to understand the circumstances under which communities backed away from the brink of change, and the tradeoffs between adaptation and resilience, short term and long term robustness, and the effects of cross-scale conjunctures. This project will involve an international, multidisciplinary team, combine theoretical and methodological innovation with fieldwork and laboratory analysis, and provide research opportunities for early career scholars.
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0.852 |
2016 — 2020 |
Lethbridge, Emily Buckland, Philip Strawhacker, Colleen [⬀] Opitz, Rachel Mcgovern, Thomas (co-PI) |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Ridir: Building Cyberinfrastructure to Enable Interdisciplinary Research On the Long-Term Human Ecodynamics of the North Atlantic @ University of Colorado At Boulder
This project will produce online tools and infrastructure to enable researchers from a broad range of disciplines to study human ecodynamics in the North Atlantic context. Climate and environments in the North Atlantic are changing rapidly and unpredictably, and local northern residents are being forced to adapt in many different ways. Data from archaeology, historic documents, climate science, and the humanities in the North Atlantic indicate that this is not the first time humans in the region of the world have faced this challenge. Research on the interactions between Arctic environments and people requires linking data from over thousands of square miles, hundreds of years, and multiple disciplines, from climatology to archaeology to the humanities to truly understand these complex interactions. Datasets often exist to be able to address these questions, but it remains difficult to find these data, make them interoperable, and analyze and visualize them in new and meaningful ways. Investing in comprehensive online cyberinfrastructure provides the opportunity to link collaborators and data from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, resulting in the opportunity for a holistic approach to understand the rapid social and environmental changes that occurred in the past and for the creation of digital tools for expanded capacity to engage other users, including students and Indigenous northern communities.
The cyberNABO project will create data-intensive online tools and infrastructure to connect archaeologists, climate scientists, humanists, and local communities with data and vignettes directly from researchers to study the long-term human ecodynamics of the North Atlantic. The ultimate goal of this project is to transform the discoverability and utility of data collected over multiple decades by multiple disciplines. The four main products of this project will be, (1) data discovery and visualization tools for multidisciplinary data from the North Atlantic, (2) a system for repeated harvesting, transformation, aggregation, indexing, and access to link databases, (3) training modules to encourage data producers and stakeholder institutions to modernize their data practices, and (4) outreach vignettes anchored in real scientific data that highlight the importance of the long-term human ecodynamics in the North Atlantic. The construction of this linked and distributed cyberinfrastructure will provide a unique opportunity to conduct genuinely transformative, collaborative research to connect natural science, social science, environmental humanities, Indigenous knowledge, and innovative data visualization in order to address the cultural and environmental drivers of the long-term human ecodynamics of the North Atlantic.
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0.866 |