This research started years ago, while I was a history undergraduate student. History and especially medieval history has always been part of my life but it took me years to start seriously studying it at university. While in my third year and though I enjoyed nearly all the history modules, I felt that reading books and archives would never fulfil my thirst for learning and I wanted to ‘touch’ the past, to be more connected. When I expressed these feelings to one of my history lecturers, his answer was clear: I had to embark on doing some archaeology and by chance he knew a professor always keen to take on board new students. I must admit that I was very impressed by the professor whose reputation was very well established, making him one of the leading researchers in his field. Our first meeting went smoothly and he gave me a week to come up with a research proposal on Iceland that would justify my integration to the international team he belonged to. It did not take long to find my topic: try to date the emergence of commercial fishing in Iceland, since all I read on that topic had not convinced me. Since the mid-twentieth century, the history of the North Atlantic World has been the target of interdisciplinary studies undertaken by archaeologists and environmental scientists. Within those studies, however, early medieval Icelandic history has received little recent academic analysis from traditional historians. This is particularly evident regarding the historical evidence for the domestic economies and external trade relations of Iceland, where principally geo-archaeologists and environmental scientists have led research. Yet, in 1981, it was an economic historian, Bruce Gelsinger, who published the most recent and detailed research on medieval Icelandic trade and economic development. Whereas it could be argued that no one work can provide a thorough study of all aspects of a chosen topic, Gelsinger provides an in-depth study of Iceland's overseas trade which remains, to date, unparalleled. Furthermore, while some historians have researched on Iceland's past (Byock, .orláksson and Jóhannesson amongst others) the historical literature shows that particular research questions, especially those regarding the function of fish in the economy of Iceland, remain unsettled.