Th o m a s H.

McG o v e r n

Maine, on October 16–19, 2009 (http://www.eaglehill.us/). The conference

was generously funded by a grant from the US National Science Foundation
(NSF), Office of Polar Programs (OPP), Arctic Social Sciences Program, as
part of President Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Our OPP grants officer, Dr. Anna Kerttula de Echave, played an invaluable and
inspirational role before, during, and after what proved to be an incredibly ener-
gized and successful meeting. The Eagle Hill meeting grew out of discussions
with the NSF about the desirability of harvesting fresh data and perspectives
acquired by some of the large-scale projects funded under new cross-disciplin-
ary initiatives, including the NSF Biocomplexity competition, the Human and
Social Dimensions of Global Change program, and the International Polar
Year (2007–2009), as well as various European interdisciplinary programs
(BOREAS, Leverhulme Trust projects), to promote more effective interre-
gional (especially north-south) communication and integration of teams, cases,
and new ideas. In spring 2009 a team drawn from the North Atlantic Biocultural
Organization (NABO) research and education cooperative (Andy Dugmore of
the University of Edinburgh, Sophia Perdikaris and Tom McGovern of CUNY,
and Astrid Ogilvie of the University of Colorado) was tasked with organizing
a working conference that would connect teams and scholars active in diverse
areas of human ecodynamics research and involve students participating in
Sophia’s Islands of Change Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)
program. The October Eagle Hill meeting eventually had seventy-one faculty
and student active participants, representing a dozen disciplines and nations
worldwide. Prior to the meeting, participants interacted through the NABO
website maintained by Dr. Anthony Newton (University of Edinburgh), and
this on-line collaboration and preparation proved critical to the success of the
meeting (for a full report on the Eagle Hill meeting and a list of faculty partici-
pants, see http://www.nabohome.org/meetings/glthec2009.html).
As part of the pre-meeting preparation we grouped participants into
working groups, each with at least two chairs charged with organizing their
groups, leading discussions before and during the meeting, and preparing pre-
sentations by each working group for discussion by the entire group. The teams
and chairs were:
• Methods, Data, and Tools (chairs Doug Price and Tina Thurston):
New analytic tools allow transformation in our abilities to trace migra-
tion, reconstruct diet, and reconstruct settlement. Some specialties
and approaches are very recent in origin (stable isotopes, aDNA), and
others have recently been able to significantly upgrade their general util-
ity through expanded data resources (archaeobotany, zooarchaeology,
geoarchaeology).
• Who Cares Wins (Shari Gearheard and Christian Keller): Education,
community involvement, policy connections, and interdisciplinary

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