The project NORSAGA is an international collaborative study which brings together a blend of social and natural science skills contributed by a team of researchers from the United States, Iceland, and Canada, in response to the 2005 European Science Foundation BOREAS competition (www.esf.org; Klein et al., 2007). It is also an official NSF IPY project. NORSAGA comprises three individual projects focused on four geographical areas of research: Iceland; Labrador/Nunatsiavut; Arctic Canada and Alaska, and Norway. The latter project falls under the auspices of the National Science Foundation while the Canadian and Icelandic components are funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for Canada (SSHRC) and by RANNÍS – the Icelandic Centre for Research respectively.

The methods to be used for NORSAGA involve the study of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), as well as the documentation and analysis of social, geographical and environmental movements, using narratives primarily in the form of historical documentary records. Standard methods of source and content analysis are used. The main time period to be covered is the past 300 years to the present. Data from the natural sciences, especially climate proxy data, are also used in NORSAGA.

The Labrador/Nunatsiavut component includes an analysis of tree-ring cellulose data. This will result in the highest resolution 300-year-record of proxy climate that has yet been produced for Labrador. This detailed record, together with proxy climate data for Iceland, will be compared with documentary and TEK data in order to enhance understanding of perceptions of boreal environmental changes and climate impacts over the last 300 years. Data from Arctic Canada and Alaska are taken primarily from the writings of the explorer Vilhjálmur Stefánsson (1889-1962).

For Norway, the TEK study is centered on the Vestre Slidre region of Valdres in the Oppland district. The contemporary focus of this part of the project considers the pastoral practice (rapidly dying out) of transhumance which involves bringing cattle up to the lush mountain pastures in the summer. For the social and environmental history component of this part of the project, data are drawn from farmers’ diaries as well as other historical sources and a winter-spring temperature reconstruction for southeastern Norway for the period 1758 to 2006 has already been published (Nordli et al., 2007).

A journey to Labrador in the spring of 2007 by PI Ogilvie to discuss changes in the location and nature of sea ice led to an unexpected discovery. The community of Makkovik, a main focus of this part of the project (population 400) was settled in the 1890s by a Norwegian by the name of Torstein Kvaerna Andersen. His home was in Begnadalen, a valley which happens to be located in the Norway study area. This link was not known to Ogilvie before her visit to Makkovik, and makes comparison of the two locations especially interesting.

NORSAGA may be seen in the context of the long tradition in Western scholarship of seeking to understand interactions between humans and their environments. Not only is the project interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, but by blending a number of different data sets, its potential for an increase in knowledge regarding social-environmental relationships is vast. Together, the three individual projects that comprise NORSAGA will yield data that will be of relevance to many different academic disciplines, among them: Arctic and boreal studies; Inuit studies; human-dimensions studies; human ecology; anthropology; archaeology; climatology; ethnography; history (both human and environmental); geography; and rural studies. The general aims of NORSAGA reflect the BOREAS call which noted that much Arctic science has been dominated by natural science agendas – with inhabitants of the Arctic often seen merely as natural variables. A major long-term goal of NORSAGA is to begin to redress this balance and consider the cultural as well as the environmental processes that shape boreal affairs. NORSAGA may also be seen in the context of the global and regional impacts of the arctic climate system and its variability, with a special focus on establishing links between environmental change and human activity. The primary objective of NORSAGA is thus to explore particular instances of changes in the past and present in order to document and understand the movements, narratives and histories of humans within their environmental context.