The North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) was formed in 1992 to aid international and interdisciplinary collaboration across the North Atlantic region. Major collaborative efforts include common standards for fieldwork and laboratory analysis, data management, integrative modeling, and a strong emphasis on education at all levels. Major meetings have taken place every two or three years (New York 1992, Glasgow 1994, Tromsø 1996, St. John’s 1997, Glasgow 2000, Copenhagen 2003, and Quebec 2006).

The Bradford NABO Conference in 2008 aims to produce a collaborative report on the current position of North Atlantic research, but more importantly the intention is to identify existing gaps and new opportunities in research and to formulate an International Research Agenda for Future Archaeological Research in the North Atlantic. This will encompass the key questions of human response to environmental and climatic change, and of human sustainability within the marginal landscapes of the North Atlantic zone. It is envisaged that the resulting agenda will facilitate future collaborative research and funding and create opportunities for young researchers entering the field.

The intention to use this meeting to reflect on key research issues was announced at the Quebec 2006 conference, in the context of the climatic and environmental changes associated with global warming resulting in threats to the archaeology of the North Atlantic zone. Such threats include the melting of previously pristine frozen archaeological contexts in Greenland a nd the impact of sea level change on much of our coastal archaeology and require an international, rather than national, debate and response. This need for international debate coincides with a NABO-led initiative entitled Human Ecodynamics in the Norse North Atlantic, linked with the International Polar Year (IPY).

The IPY effort seeks to promote scientific investigations that cross social science / natural science divides and to better pool different national areas of expertise to create both a high-visibility event for a wide public and a set of lasting products promoting ongoing collaborations in science, education, and outreach.

Although the NABO Research Agenda needs to encompass a wider range of interest groups than the IPY research programme, there is a crossover between the two initiatives. As the research themes discussed for the IPY programme have relevance to the NABO community as a whole they are presented below, with some modifications.

Major research themes discussed at the IPY meeting in Edinburgh included:

• Seafaring and the reconstruction of maritime capabilities. The islands and coasts of the North Atlantic are connected by the sea as much as the sea divides them. A better understanding of the nature of past sea conditions and normal capabilities of past seafarers is needed. This might include an assessment of the hazards of different voyages, capabilities for large scale transfer of population and resources.
• Landnám and initial settlement conditions; How were initial settlement / subsistence decisions made, how was an initial store of “traditional environmental knowledge” (TEK) accumulated, how was changing status negotiated/contested, what evidence flags significant differences / continuities between first settlement economy and ecology and later periods? Reassessment needs to incorporate cognitive and political as well as economic and environmental variables.
• Adaptation vs. resilience; in developing island (and coastal) economies is there a rising curve in connection, intensification, investment in fixed resource spaces, social and material infrastructure which increases the effectiveness of adaptation at the cost of overall resilience in the face of variation? How does the shifting balance between marine and terrestrial resource use (green foot/blue foot) affect resilience on the local, regional, and inter-regional level? Do concepts borrowed from island biogeography and the popular resilience frameworks have a direct relevance for complex human-landscape and human-human interactions? What structures can be identified as conserving resilience or promoting specialization? What role do “reserve resources” (fish, sea birds, sea mammals?) play in providing flexibility to adaptive systems, and how do these roles change with time and in different island and coastal contexts? How does changing distribution of woodlands interact with fuel consumption, winter stock sheltering, construction use, movement routes?
• Continuity and discontinuity; assessing “collapse”, “success”, “sustainability” from a long term, wide scale perspective. Why are settlement and abandonment decisions made on the scale of farmstead, grazing area, valley system, or island? What factors characterize long-occupied locations in different islands? Do “over-optimistic” pioneer fringe settlements recur in different periods and locations? What factors distinguish cycles of temporary abandonment/reoccupation from both continuous settlements and permanent abandonment?
• Climate impacts; effects of strings of good and bad years, extreme events, threshold crossings (such as advent of summer sea ice in SW Greenland ca 1250-1300), making use of high-resolution proxy climate indicators and direct climate records to make effective use of the new “human scaled” historical climatology, integrating with high resolution indicators of geomorphology, livestock management, human dietary changes.
• Inter-Scale interactions: All participating field research programs are explicitly aimed at expanding from single-site focus to a broader multi-site landscape perspective, driven in part by the realization that major economic and environmental forces above the scale of the individual site have greatly affected the nature and viability of single farms and regional settlement systems. Trading contacts within islands, between islands, and between islands and larger continental economies prior to 1100 may have been undervalued and remain poorly understood.
• Time depth: Some N Atlantic islands and coastal regions have seen human occupation and successive phases of landscape creation since the Mesolithic. Others represented an effectively clean slate for large-scale agricultural settlement. Understanding the effects of accumulated landscape heritage (place names, constructed landscape features, soil creation/augmentation and depletion, species extinction/conservation, and overall adaptive resilience) over different time scales.