Landscape legacies of Landnám in Iceland: What has happened to the environment as a result of settlement, why did it happen and what have been some of the consequences

Landnám, the late 9th century Norse colonization of Iceland, brought profound change to the island (Vésteinsson et al. 2002). Here we can reflect on humans as a ‘force of nature’ – in as system with a clear recent baseline of conditions without people. We can consider how we can both affect environmental changes as well as being influenced by them. Legacies of Landnám have played out in numerous ways as direct and indirect effects on human settlement have interacted on multiple temporal and spatial scales with landscapes of differing sensitivity and contrasting natural trajectories of change. In this paper we evaluate these legacies and interactions and consider what has happened to the environment; likely explanations for those changes and the consequences. We do this mindful of Kintigh’s and others’ (2014) systematic effort to identify archaeology’s most important scientific challenges. In their summary of these Grand Challenges facing the discipline they emphasise the need to understand how humans have shaped Earth’s biological and physical systems and to understand when and how humans became dominant drivers of change (Kintigh et al. 2004). The legacies of Landnám in Iceland provide a well-constrained case study that can help illuminate this challenge, and thus bring a wider meaning and significance to detailed work on one of the last settled places on Earth