Vegetation history in Mývatnssveit, Iceland

• Main Authors: Ian Lawson, Katy Roucoux, Alice Milner, Mike Church, Rosie Bishop, Árni Einarsson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.607.1763; http://www.nabohome.org/publications/ipy/VegetationHistoryMyvatnssveit.pdf

forms part of our efforts to understand the landscape history in general, and past vegetation dynamics and modification by humans in particular, in Mývatnssveit, northern Iceland. This field expedition had three specific aims: 1) To procure sediment sequences from a number of lakes in the Mývatnssveit region. This aim relates to an ongoing project to reconstruct vegetation history using pollen analysis, some results of which are already published [15, 17, 20]. 2) To excavate a number of charcoal productions pits and take samples for radiocarbon dating, to establish the timing of woodland exploitation across the region. 3) To undertake experiments to produce charcoal using traditional Icelandic methods, to improve our ability to interpret the archaeological data from charcoal production pits. The fieldwork corresponding to each aim will be discussed in turn below. 1. Lake sediment coring Lake sediment records have demonstrated their potential to provide useful landscape-scale summaries of vegetation history in this region. However, the limited research so far shows that different lakes yield differing records, so there is a need to replicate the results we already have in