Current ICAZ Working Groups

NABO Zooarchaeology Working Group—

North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) is an international, interdisciplinary research and education cooperative formed in 1992. It participates as a working group in ICAZ as a regional association promoting Zooarchaeology and the integration of faunal research into multi-disciplinary projects in the field and laboratory in our region which on the circumpolar rim connects the Barents Sea and Labrador, with many extensions southwards (see website at www.nabohome.org, for enquiries contact nabo@voicenet.com). NABO has sponsored ICAZ Zooarchaeology projects directly and by working in collaboration with other ICAZ working groups (notably Fish and Bird WG). Our objectives for ICAZ have been initially to aid N Atlantic zooarchaeologists with basic identification tools (especially for the more challenging birds, fish, and sea mammals), promote comparable recording and reporting (through common data management packages), and to work closely with excavators to upgrade and standardize recovery strategies (sieves & flotation everywhere).

We also work to more effectively integrate Zooarchaeology with Geoarchaeology, Archaeobotany, and with “normal” archaeology in our common investigations of the past within our wet and windy region. NABO also seeks to bridge natural science/ social science divides and to promote more effective interdisciplinary as well as international communication. NABO general meetings (New York 1992, Glasgow 1994, Tromsø 1996, St John's Newfl. 1997, Reykjavik 1996, 1997, Akureyri 1999, Glasgow 2001, Copenhagen 2004, Québec 2006, Bradford 2008) always have major zooarchaeological participation and smaller ad hoc workshops take place every year. NABO sponsors field schools, public outreach and community involvement, and encourages and supports students at all levels.

An early joint NABO / ICAZ project was the development of a simple but flexible bone recording and data management package now called NABONE (9th edition is available for download as freeware), following a very productive meeting of 27 active N Atlantic zooarchaeologists held at City University of New York in 1997. This package (now improved and lab-tested by a wide range of users) is based on MS Access and Excel and has provided a useful common recording and data storage and manipulation platform that has been widely adopted in the N Atlantic area. Full NABONE teaching packages (including osteological identification aids and class problems) have been mailed on DVD worldwide (379 sets as of Fall 2010, contact nabo@voicenet.com for this free package).

A NABO/ICAZ Fish Remains WG collaboration in 2003-6 has resulted in another digital tool; FISHBONE 1.1 (freeware download available) which provides digital images and illustrations of multiple elements of the North Atlantic fish species most commonly encountered in archaeofauna in the area (and a useful cookbook as well). FISHBONE has helped standardize identifications in our region and has contributed to the widespread replacement of earlier (very restricted) element identifications to species level with a wider approach that has promoted new perspectives on early commercialization of fisheries in the North Atlantic and detected the source of the ca AD 1000 “Fish Event Horizon” in Britain and NW Europe (another Viking impact from Scandinavia).

In March 2009 NABO sponsored a bird and marine mammal working session hosted by U Edinburgh with participation by scholars from ICAZ Bird Working group, several UK science centers, and the Icelandic Inst. of Natural History. One result for ICAZ zooarchaeology was the extremely generous posting by Dr. Derek Yaldon of his monumental Leverhulme Trust funded British Isles Archaeological Bird Database on the NABO website as a free download. This meeting also advanced the NABO digital bird osteology project (now led by Dale Serjeantson, Aevar Petersen and Seth Brewington) which is now going forward as part of the wider EU funded STERNA project (http://www.sterna-net.eu/) which will soon produce a widely useable N Atlantic bird bone osteology manual to aid zooarchaeology. This NABO-ICAZ-STERNA collaboration will round out the NABO ICAZ WG attempt to improve basic comparability of identification and recording within the N Atlantic region, and in combination with the growing VZAP (Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic Project, see http://vzap.iri.isu.edu) should provide new and experienced zooarchaeologists with a useful set of digital tools that may be applicable outside our region.

NABO has sponsored a graduate level field school in international and interdisciplinary archaeology in Iceland in collaboration with Archaeological Inst. Iceland, U Aberdeen, and CUNY since 1997 and have collaborated closely with U Bradford in an undergraduate level field school now going forward in Rousay in collaboration with Orkney College. Students interested in hands-on Zooarchaeology in a fieldwork context should check the NABO website for further information.

Thanks to generous support from the US National Science Foundation and Icelandic sources, NABO also works closely with local high schools and community organizations in Iceland and Barbuda as part of the Islands of Change program led by Dr. Sophia Perdikaris. This program engages local students and teachers in field science projects, and zooarchaeology (with its excellent hands-on potentials) has played a major role in this expanding effort. We are indebted to the pioneering example of Bone Jones’s outreach in York, and we are very interested in hearing from other zooarchaeologists involved in public outreach work.

In 2007-10 NABO represented ICAZ in the International Polar Year program (http://www.ipy.org/) with coordinated field and laboratory research in Faroes, Shetland, Iceland, and Greenland (funding generously provided by US National Science Foundation, Canada, and Denmark). This IPY was the first to incorporate social science and the participation of northern residents in the international science effort, and the first to actively investigate human impacts on the polar regions. The NABO teams were able to share data, students, and expertise effectively in large part due to the prior work in developing comparable data recovery and recording methods as part of ICAZ and the work of the field schools in training an excellent cadre of younger professionals who see international cross disciplinary collaboration as normal science. IPY field reports and unpublished zooarchaeology reports are all available for download at the NABO website, and more will be added in the near future. The NABO website also now features a Google Earth based project reporting system to display and provide access to project data and zooarchaeology reports, and we will be glad to post additional links and findings on this system.

In 2009-10, NABO was tasked by the US National Science Foundation to develop a series of meetings aimed at coordinating efforts to incorporate archaeology into a wider study of long term human ecodynamics and global change. This effort (funded by the Obama ARRA stimulus) produced a major meeting at Eagle Hill Maine in October 2009, and a series of follow up meetings organized by Ben Fitzhugh and a volume edited by Payson Sheets and Jago Cooper. These meetings have led to the formation of a new Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance (GHEA) aimed at promoting more effective use of the long term perspective of the past to serve present and future. ICAZ members are well placed to contribute to this new initiative, and are urged to check out the GHEA website and join this new group at http://gheahome.org. The NABO working group will represent ICAZ in GHEA and at the upcoming Resilience 2011 meetings (March 11-14th 2011, Phoeniz AZ, see http://www.resilience2011.org/). All ICAZ members are invited to participate in these new integrative efforts, all of which will hugely benefit from an informed zooarchaeological perspective.

NABO is an informal research and education cooperative, membership is free and open to all. Please regularly check the NABO website for new reports, announcements, and collaborative projects. All freeware products and pdf reports mentioned above is available through the NABO website at http://www.nabohome.org/products/products.html

This information was contributed by Thomas McGovern on September 8, 2010.