The Faeroes are killing me

Right, a case on environmental change caused by the Viking settlement of the islands of the North Atlantic. Sounds simple enough. 

This theme was rather a nightmare during the original exhibition production, because, honestly, it is a hard thing to explain in the typical 2 minutes people devote to an exhibition case. So we spread it around here or there. The case on the Faeroes introduced the idea, with two lengths of juniper rope. Juniper no longer exists on the Faeroes, because the Vikings cut it all down. Problem was, the rope was not interesting enough to draw anyone to even look at the case, let alone take time to read the label copy. People just walked passed it, perhaps noted it had the word Faeroes in it. 

Then for Iceland we tried to expand on it. No artifacts, just three pictures (set originally in a rotating system) of the three phases of the settlement of Iceland. Phase 1: lots of animals, lots of trees, several large farms, thick green grass high up the mountains. Second phase: wild animals and forests gone, lots of large farms, erosion setting in. Phase 3: grazing animals everywhere, small farms everywhere, lots of snow on the mountains. 

I made the decision not to bring those paintings here; figure it would be a bit presumptuous of an American to tell Icelanders a lot about their history. 

Well, and just to finish my story, in the original Smithsonian exhibition, we then had several cases on the collapse of the Greenland settlements, which may not have been directly caused by environmental change, but sure as heck fire was not helped by it (and I note, this was way before Jared Diamond's book on the subject). I would have been up for taking these cases, but I thought that the Danish National Museum would be done with their plans for a new exhibition on the Greenland Norse, so that there would not be much material available. I was wrong. 

OK, so that left me with the one case on the Faeroe Islands, to carry the whole of the environmental change story. And it was not a good case.

So, I decided to change it, not get the juniper rope, write new copy, whatever I could. And it occurred to me that bones probably was a more effective way of suggesting environmental over-utilization than anything else. I therefore asked the Faeroes National Museum for a lot of bones. Most of their "faunal remains" were being analyzed in New York, which is why I had to go there. So far so good. Until I realized that the off-white fabric behind the bones was probably not going to work so well. 

Amazing how decisions cascade upon one another, until one finds oneself carefully crafting brackets for pig bones and making grey cut outs of birds and fish late at night. And I haven't even gotten to the fun part of wiring the bones onto the grey print outs.