fieldwork

The CUNY Northern Science
and Education Center (NORSEC)


CUNY graduate and undergraduate students excavate one of the oldest sites in North Iceland.

The Northern Science and Education Center at the City University of New York, a collaborative effort involving four college campuses and The Graduate Center, has its headquarters at Brooklyn College's department of Anthropology and Archaeology. Even before its formal opening in Spring 2001, NORSEC members organized international meetings, planned the 2000 international field school in Iceland, organized a session for the Society for American Archaeology meetings in 2000, and involved students in cutting-edge research.

The circumpolar north includes not only the high arctic, but also the cold but productive and historically critical waters of the North Pacific and North Atlantic, the majority of the territory of the rapidly changing Russian Federation, and a large part of the Scandinavian world. In recent years, the circumpolar north has moved from being a zone of military confrontation during the cold war to a center for large-scale international cooperation. As concerns about global environmental changes deepen, there has been widespread scientific recognition that the north is an essential area for monitoring major changes in temperature, marine and atmospheric circulation, greenhouse gases, pollution spread, and ozone depletion.


Changes in North Atlantic climate and sea ice distribution are recognized as key elements in anticipated global change over the
next century.

The arctic has been a key area for American science since the 18th century, and scholars from New York have been involved in northern research for many years. Franz Boaz did some of his best work among the Inuit of the central artic. The American Museum of Natural History holds some of the most important northern archaeological and ethnographic collections in the world. The last decades have seen a groundswell of northern science initiatives. The Arctic Consortium of the United States (ARCUS), a consortium of U.S. universities and centers, formed in 1987. The National Science Foundation now maintains a separate Office of Polar Programs, with a large and heavily-funded Arctic Section. No other part of the globe rates a special geographically-defined section within the NSF. Northern social science has also become an important area of study, aided by a new NSF OPP Arctic Social Science Program.

CUNY scholars have decades of northern field experience and are at the forefront of northern research and education. To date, CUNY has attracted over $2.1 million in external funding for its northern projects. Of that amount, over $600,000 (in grants to Professors Sophia Perdikaris, Gerald Sider, and Tom McGovern) was awarded by the National Science Foundation.

NORSEC Activities

  • The North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) Cooperative is an internationally recognized non-governmental research cooperative with over 450 members in fourteen countries. NABO includes 40 research centers in North America, the EU, and Scandinavia. Two major grants to NABO from the National Science Foundation's Polar Programs total over $1 million.

  • The CUNY - NABO - FSO International Field School in Iceland has attracted CUNY graduate and undergraduate students to its summer sessions since 1996. Participants work with students from all over the globe on projects both archaeological and environmental in scope.

    Field School excavations of the Viking-age chieftain's farm of Hofstadir, famous for its large feasting hall /pagan temple. The site is probably among the first farms established in Iceland ca. AD 874. Excellent preservation of animal bones, egg shell, charcoal and plant phytoliths allow detailed reconstruction of the massive environmental impact of these early settlers on this previously uninhabited mid-Atlantic island.

  • NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Programs. In 1990 two Hunter College undergraduate women participated in a special REU supplement to NSF research grants awarded to Professor McGovern. Both women entered doctoral programs, and one (Sophia Perdikaris, CUNY 1998 PhD) is now an associate professor at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center. Professor Perdikaris participated in a three-year (1991-1993) $160,000 REU sites grant at the Hunter Bioarchaeology Laboratory, ranked among the top three REU sites applications in a nation-wide all-disciplines competition. In 1999 the CUNY field school was aided by an $18,000 REU supplement from the Office of Polar Programs which sponsored two undergraduates and one high school science teacher to participate in the work in Iceland. All of CUNY's REU participants have gone on to join doctoral programs or enter successful professional careers.


    The origins of the North Atlantic commercial fisheries is a
    major topic of global change research. The fisheries are
    in crisis due to over-exploitation of stock.

  • Newfoundland and CUNY. Field research trips to Newfoundland have been organized by Anthropology Program Professor Gerald Sider since 1872. This research has resulted in numerous publications, including the book Culture, Anthropology, and Newfoundland. In 1992 Professor Sider began research centered on the effects of the termination of the cod fishery on Newfoundland villages. This research continues, with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the PSC-CUNY, and has expanded into a comparative analysis of the effects on people in the southern U.S. of the demise of tenant farming.

  • Cooperative research at the Hunter Bioarchaeology Laboratory, Hard Tissue Research Unit, and the Analytical Microscopy and Imaging Center in Anthropology. Cooperation across these subdisciplines has produced several studies relating changes in animal bones excavated from archaeological sites in the north to changes in sea ice and ocean current circulation. The collaboration will soon be expanded to include the new Brooklyn College Zooarchaeology Laboratory.

  • Publication outlet for contemporary political-economic dynamics in northern indigenous communities. The University of Nebraska Press has begun publication of a series directed and edited by Professors Sider and Kirk Dombrowski (John Jay College). The series, Fourth World Rising: Contemporary Native Struggles in the Americas and Beyond has an overall focus on native studies throughout the Americas, with a significant number of forthcoming monographs that will focus on northern communities.

  • Dissertation Improvement Grants. In 1996 Anthropology Program student Jim Woollett was awarded a two-year NSF Polar Programs Doctoral Improvement Grant of $24,000 to support his work in Labrador. Woollett's archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork has since been recognized by Labrador Inuit communities and his results have proven to have great significance for global change climate research.

  • Coordinated work with northern native communities. Since 1993 Professor Dombrowski has been working with the Haida tribe of Alaska on issues of culture, history, and cultural rights. In 1995 he was named a repatriation advisor for the Hydaburg Cooperative Association (the governing tribal body), working with tribal authorities to obtain information on items of cultural heritage and human remains taken by non-natives over the past 150 years. A portion of this work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (a 1995-1996 dissertation research grant). Continuing work in the cultural history of the north Pacific has been supported by a Mellon Fellowship at the Library of the American Philosophical Society.

    Community revitalization movements, northern native activism, rapid social change, and the emergence of self-governing provinces in northern Canada (Nunavut) and Greenland (Kalaaliit Nunaata) and native corporations in Alaska all demonstrate the social dynamism of a region marked more by oil rigs and computer-aided classrooms than by snow houses. Environmental change concerns have stimulated coordinated interdisciplinary work on the long term record of human-environmental interaction. Historical ecology in the north is a particularly active field. The new multi-centered international educational initiative, University of the Arctic, includes the successful CUNY field school in Iceland in its program and is inviting our further participation.

    Participating CUNY Faculty

    Thomas McGovern (archaeology, Iceland, climate)
    Sophia Perdikaris (archaeology, north Norway, fisheries)
    Gerald Sider (cultural anthropology, Newfoundland)
    Kirk Dombrowski (cultural anthropology, Alaska)
    Susan Lees (cultural anthropology, fisheries, Maine)
    Timothy Bromage (physical anthropology, AMICA & HTRU labs)
    Arthur Bankoff (archaeology, Brooklyn Field School)

    Associated External Centers

    University of the Arctic, Rovaniemi, Finland
    Center for Northern Studies, Wolcott, Vermont
    Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum & Arctic Studies Center, Bowdoin College, Maine
    Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado at Boulder
    Arctic Consortium of the U.S., Fairbanks, Alaska
    University of Akureyri, Iceland
    Stefansson Arctic Institute, Akureyri
    Archaeological Institute of Iceland, Reykjavik
    University of Edinburgh, U.K.



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    last modified 1.22.03
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