The biogeographical status of Alnus crispa (Ait.) Pursch in sub-Arctic southern Greenland : Do pollen records indicate local populations during the past 1500 years?

The Leverhulme Trust is thanked for financial support. We also thank the referees for their constructive comments that helped to improve the paper.Peer reviewedPostprin

Shieling activity in the Norse Eastern Settlement : palaeoenvironment of the 'Mountain Farm', Vatnahverfi, Greenland

Peer reviewedPostprin

Competing hypotheses, ordination and pollen preservation : landscape impacts of Norse landnám in southern Greenland

We thank the Leverhulme Trust for financial support, and Gordon Cook and staff at SUERC for the provision of radiocarbon dates. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers and Shinya Sugita for valuable comments which improved the manuscript.Peer reviewedPostprin

A multiple profile approach to the palynological reconstruction of Norse landscapes in Greenland's Eastern Settlement

Acknowledgments The Leverhulme Trust is thanked for financial support. Gordon Cook provided radiocarbon dates. Thanks are also due to Andy McMullen for botanical identifications and assistance in the field, and to Sikuu Motzfeld for hospitality during fieldwork. We are also grateful to Emilie Gauthier, Mike Kaplan, Pete Langdon and Alan Gillespie for their comments.Peer reviewedPostprin

High-resolution palynology reveals the land-use history of a Sami renvall in northern Sweden

Acknowledgements: This research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust through the Footprints on the Edge of Thule project, and was written under the auspices of the ERC-funded project Arctic Domus. Thanks are offered to Audrey Innes for laboratory assistance; Ian Foster for 210Pb dating; Gordon Cook for AMS radiocarbon analyses; and Martin Konert and the late Sjoerd Bohncke for assistance with LOI and related analyses. The comments of Tim Mighall, Jeff Blackford, Mari Kuoppamaa, two anonymous referees and the editor helped to improve the paper.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Environmental challenges for the medieval North Atlantic world

Open access via T&F agreementPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Multiparty Electoral Competition in the Netherlands and Germany: A Model Based on Multinomial Probit

A typical assumption of electoral models of party competition is that parties adopt policy positions so as to maximize expected vote share. Here we use Euro-barometer survey data and European elite-study data from 1979 for the Netherlands and Germany to construct a stochastic model of voter response, based on multinomial probit estimation. For each of these countries, we estimate a pure spatial electoral voting model and a joint spatial model. The latter model also includes individual voter and demographic characteristics. The pure spatial models for the two countries quite accurately described the electoral response as a stochastic function of party positions. We use these models to perform a thought experiment so as to estimate the expected vote maximizing party positions. We go on to propose a model of internal party decision-making based both on pre-election electoral estimation and postelection coalition bargaining. This model suggests why the various parties in the period in question did not adopt vote maximizing positions. We argue that maximizing expected vote will not, in general, be a rational party strategy in multiparty political systems which are based on proportional representation.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116246/1/pc98.pd

First evidence of cryptotephra in palaeoenvironmental records associated with Norse occupation sites in Greenland

The Norse/Viking occupation of Greenland is part of a dispersal of communities across the North Atlantic coincident with the supposed Medieval Warm Period of the late 1st millennium AD. The abandonment of the Greenland settlements has been linked to climatic deterioration in the Little Ice Age as well as other possible explanations. There are significant dating uncertainties over the time of European abandonment of Greenland and the potential influence of climatic deterioration. Dating issues largely revolve around radiocarbon chronologies for Norse settlements and associated mire sequences close to settlement sites. Here we show the potential for moving this situation forward by a combination of palynological, radiocarbon and cryptotephra analyses of environmental records close to three ‘iconic’ Norse sites in the former Eastern Settlement of Greenland – Herjolfsnes, Hvalsey and Garðar (the modern Igaliku). While much work remains to be undertaken, our results show that palynological evidence can provide a useful marker for both the onset and end of Norse occupation in the region, while the radiocarbon chronologies for these sequences remain difficult. Significantly, we here demonstrate the potential for cryptotephra to become a useful tool in resolving the chronology of Norse occupation, when coupled with palynology. For the first time, we show that cryptotephra are present within palaeoenvironmental sequences located within or close to Norse settlement ruin-groups, with tephra horizons detected at all three sites. While shard concentrations were small at Herjolfsnes, concentrations sufficient for geochemical analyses were detected at Igaliku and Hvalsey. WDS-EPMA analyses of these tephra indicate that, unlike the predominantly Icelandic tephra sources reported in the Greenland ice core records, the tephra associated with the Norse sites correlate more closely with volcanic centres in the Aleutians and Cascades. Recent investigations of cryptotephra dispersal from North American centres, along with our new findings, point to the potential for cryptotephra to facilitate hypothesis testing, providing a key chronological tool for refining the timing of Norse activities in Greenland (e.g. abandonment) and of environmental contexts and drivers (e.g. climate forcing)

Europeanization of sub-arctic environments : perspectives from Norse Greenland's outer fjords

Acknowledgements The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Leverhulme Trust Footprints on the Edge of Thule Programme Award. ECL acknowledges the support of the Weissman International Internship Program, the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Department of Anthropology at Harvard. We would also like to thank George McLeod (University of Stirling) for manufacturing soil thin sections.Peer reviewedPostprin