£1M funding to investigate the effects of human and environmental change in the North Atlantic
The University of Aberdeen has been awarded a second major grant from the Leverhulme Trust to investigate human-environment interactions in the North Atlantic region.
At a time when climate change is being seen to exert a potentially powerful influence on social and economic development, it could be highly relevant to determine the long-term effects that climate and wider changes have had upon the lives of people in environmentally-sensitive areas.
The £1M project aims to develop new approaches to explain landscape changes caused by human activity in these naturally variable environments and to provide an understanding of how co-existing nomadic and farming groups reacted to changes in climate, environment and economic conditions.
Professor Kevin Edwards of the Department of Geography and Environment, School of Geosciences, is Principal Applicant for the research and is delighted with the award of funding. He said: “Once again, this represents a magnificent level of support from the Leverhulme Trust. Research for our current grant has focused upon Viking colonization of ‘pristine’ landscapes in the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland.
“Leading on from this, the new project will develop further the notion of human impacts, but it will also seek to investigate the subtle indications for Norse interactions with indigenous people in peripheral areas of the near-Arctic North Atlantic region and specifically the Thule Inuit of Greenland and Saami groups in Norway and Sweden. It should add to the debate about the factors contributing to societal success or failure in marginal environments and it has particular relevance to modern polar communities facing the challenges of conservation in a changing world.”
The term ‘Thule’ is applied to sites, and the material culture, of the precursors of the modern Inuit in Greenland. As a metaphor, Thule is used in a wide sense to encompass a circumpolar area subject to medieval European expansionism.
Footprints on the edge of Thule: landscapes of Norse-indigenous interaction will continue and develop a range of multidisciplinary approaches drawn from the environmental and social sciences, including palaeoecology, landform and soil change, archaeology and computer modelling of land use management.
The proposal will foster new research links as well as strengthen existing ones. The four-year project involves co-applicants Drs Andrew Dugmore and Eva Panagiotakopulu of the University of Edinburgh and Professor Ian Simpson of the University of Stirling. There will be close collaboration with the Universities of Trømso in Norway and Umeå in Sweden, and the National Museums of Greenland and Denmark.
The research award will start in September 2007 following the completion of a Leverhulme Trust-funded five-year Research Programme Grant.