Val Dufeu's 2018 monograph provides a fascinating grounding on early medieval fish exploitation in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. For readers interested in the history of pan-North Atlantic interactions, Dufeu's work provides an overview of a facet of this world that rarely appears in English-language scholarly literature. Iceland and, to a lesser extent, the Faroe Islands were crucial contributors to the European North Atlantic marine fish trade from the thirteenth century until the opening of the Newfoundland cod fisheries in the early sixteenth century. The general (English-language) literature is, however, curiously quiet on how these islands grew to become significant players in the international fisheries. To readers with an archaeological background, it would seem obvious that the thirteenth-century and later fisheries probably built on earlier precursors, but Dufeu argues that this has been a contentious issue in the historiographies of both Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
Dufeu's main aim for this research was to identify the emergence of a commercial fishery in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, potentially stretching back to the initial ninth-century Norse settlement period. She is a medieval environmental historian and comes to this research from an historian's perspective, which will be addressed more fully below. In her Introduction, Dufeu argues that Iceland and the Faroe Islands’ pre-thirteenth-century social and economic patterns are not sufficiently addressed in the historiographical literature due to a dearth of surviving written documents, both historical and literary sources, such as related sagas. Dufeu suggests that the agrarian perspectives of early Norse Icelandic and Faroese settlement and economic patterns persistent in the historiography are based around the limited historical records available. For Dufeu, historians are also guilty of assuming a close similarity between these islands and other Norse settlement patterns. She outlines a more holistic approach to the research in order to circumvent the longstanding biases in literature; one that incorporates both historical and archaeological datasets.
From here, Dufeu presents a succinct overview of previous archaeological work on the islands and provides a very useful introduction to the main historical document sets available to researchers in this region. To the non-specialist, Dufeu's descriptions and critiques of the related sagas were particularly interesting, as they present a slightly unusual literature dataset for researchers. In Chapter 3, Dufeu's background as a traditional environmental historian becomes quite clear, as she strongly argues for an interdisciplinary approach that would be viewed as not only normal but absolutely essential to any archaeologist of any historical period. For readers practising historical archaeology, Dufeu wastes a significant amount of prose arguing for the value of combining archaeological, environmental and written sources in research. It seems as though she is not familiar with the depth and authority of historical archaeology as a discipline. Parts of the book still read like a PhD dissertation, rather than a monograph, and suggest that the work required further editing prior to publication. This may explain some of Dufeu's uncertainty and desire to justify the use of an interdisciplinary approach.
Chapter 5 presents what Dufeu argues is a ‘model’ of the early exploitation of marine resources in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Dufeu's attempted application of a non-standard ‘core-periphery’ model to Icelandic and Faroese international interaction is weak. The value of her work is not as a ‘model’, however. Rather, it is more an in-depth examination of the specific environmental, economic, social and historical contexts on these islands that provide fertile ground for the development of a commercial fishery; i.e. a fishery that provides resources beyond immediate household needs. She convincingly argues that, despite a lack of written sources, there was a holistic context appropriate for the development of a sophisticated fishery system early in the periods of Norse settlement for both areas.
In Chapter 6, Dufeu attempts to provide geoarchaeological and zooarchaeological evidence for the emergence of commercial fisheries from several sites in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Unfortunately, her inexperience in presenting archaeological datasets is quite apparent. The evidence, as presented, is muddled and inconsistent between sites. She uses a confusing array of previously excavated and re-excavated sites and does not sufficiently address some clear issues with the data, such as the temporality of the evidence. She includes evidence stretching from the ninth through to the seventeenth centuries on some of the sites in order to contextualise ninth- and tenth-century fishing practices, such as at the site of Skútustađir, Iceland (pp. 200–201), which is obviously problematic. Her presented analyses are further hindered by poorly rendered graphs, drawings and maps throughout this chapter. For example, when discussing micromorphology sample Gjo 11 from the Gjögur site in Iceland, she provides a stratigraphic drawing that includes all of the sample areas, save for Gjo 11 (p. 182). I would suggest readers might want to consult the original archaeological reports when reading this chapter as it is unclear from Dufeu's descriptions how reliable the data presented actually are.
Overall, despite the issues with her archaeological data, Dufeu presents a relatively coherent argument that the development of commercial fisheries in Iceland and the Faroe Islands was earlier than suggested in the current historiography. Her descriptions on how labour and resource-processing would have differed and intersected between different classes of sites (high status vs middle status, processing vs fishing/seasonal) will be useful for future researchers, particularly those keen on excavating lower-visibility sites, such as seasonal fishing installations in Iceland, the Faroe Islands and other Norse settlement areas in the Atlantic. Finally, her basic overview of the history and historiography of the region is valuable to the English-speaking, non-specialist reader: Dufeu gleans information from sources in a variety of languages and has usefully written about them in English here.
