Archaeology for the Anthropocene: Scale, soil, and the settlement of Iceland

Abstract

Abstract Archaeologists have devised numerous methods for measuring and describing past human-environmental interactions, but connecting historic case studies with present-day global concerns often proves challenging. New ways of considering scale are needed to bring case studies of past communities into productive conversation with the global Anthropocene. Iceland, one of the last land masses colonized by humans, was transformed by the agricultural practices of the first generations of Norse settlers in the 9th and 10th centuries, including a significant reduction in forest cover and soil loss to erosion. However, the large-scale, island-wide process of erosion manifested in different ways that become clear when changes in soil cover are investigated at the regional scale. These changes were beneficial in some places and detrimental in others, and the development of inequality was contingent on both social and environmental contexts. Scholars of the contemporary Anthropocene must likewise connect local effects, including landscape degradation and social inequality, to anthropogenic processes that operate beyond the scale of everyday experience. Social landscapes, including infrastructure and environmental degradation, act in concert with ecological processes to reconstitute the ‘natural’ into new, taken-for-granted landscapes of inequality. Studying the way past communities experienced relatively larger-scale anthropogenic environmental change leads to new ways of thinking about, and perhaps managing, human responses to contemporary global-scale change.