Explorations
Secrets of Ancient Iceland
Dispatch 1: Digging into the Viking Age
"Science is at the junction between the expected and the real," Penn State anthropologist Paul Durrenberger told me. "The whole point of it is figuring out what's real and what's not."
I am standing in a hayfield in Iceland in a gale-force wind, one of six volunteers holding down a 100-meter measuring tape with our toes. Bundled in raincoats and stocking caps, we are feeling fortunate that at least the sun is shining. Tourists visiting the Glaumbaer Folk Museum, a collection of historic buildings up on the hill, stop and stare down at us.
A reconstruction of a Viking Age turfhouse, showing the building techniques used in Iceland a thousand years ago. Photo by Dean Goodman
"A lot of people asked me," said Sigridur Sigurdardottir, the museum curator, "'What are those crazy people doing out there in your hayfield?'"
What we think we are doing is taking pictures of a Viking longhouse buried beneath our feet. But at the moment, the only thing that's real is the wind.
Down the line comes the leader of our archaeological crew, John Steinberg of UCLA's Cotsen Institute, and I take two steps back to let him pass. We've been doing this little dance now for five hours. Steinberg is pulling on a length of two-by-four duct-taped to a heavy orange box. Earlier this week he dissected a green plastic watering can and taped curved pieces of it to the front of the box; now, with its more rounded prow, the box is sliding more freely but Steinberg is still working up a sweat.
Wired to the box is a data recorder carried by Brian Damiata, a UCLA geophysicist. Matching Steinberg step for step, Damiata trips a switch to log every meter. He is careful not to hit the cable with his knee: The bump gets recorded as data. Already a whole day's work had to be thrown out for one such glitch.
Sometimes the GPR remote sensing device works better without its cart, but then it takes two people to run it. Here, Dean Goodman records the data at a test site in western Iceland. Photo by Gisli Palsson
Damiata and Steinberg are testing a remote sensing device called Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). The orange box sends microwaves into the soil and picks up the echoes. These echoes can be translated into animations of what the hayfield might look like if you could slice it horizontally, ten centimeters at a time. The GPR-Slice software was developed by California-based geophysicist Dean Goodman, who has come with us to see if it can tell the difference between plain dirt and the turf walls of a Viking house.
I'm here dancing in the wind at the invitation of Paul Durrenberger, whose theory about early Iceland this archaeological survey was designed to test. Tradition—based on a romantic reading of the medieval Icelandic sagas—says that Iceland was an "almost democracy" from its settlement by Vikings in 870 until 1262, when it became part of the kingdom of Norway. Durrenberger believes the society was more hierarchical, that landholders controlled all the resources and the rest of the population from the beginning. He details his view in the book The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland (University of Iowa Press, 1992). If Steinberg and his crew can map all the Viking Age and later medieval houses in the valley, Durrenberger will be able to see from the change in settlement pattern when the political economy of Iceland changed from these chiefdoms to a manorial system.
A sample GPR radargram from Glaumbaer, after being enhanced by Dean Goodman's special software, GPR-Slice. The dark colors show where the microwaves reflected off something other than dirt. By taking thousands of scans at different settings and angles, the scientists can see the walls, hearth, and stone entranceway of the longhouse that is buried a meter underground. Photo by Dean Goodman
So far it looks like Durrenberger is right, and the change happened well before 1262. At Glaumbaer, the Viking longhouse was abandoned just after 1104 and a new manor house was built up on the museum's hill, where an 18th-century turf farmhouse now sits. Durrenberger joined the project a week late—after we should have (but didn't) have the bugs worked out of the remote sensing device. A cultural anthropologist whose experience in archaeology is of the traditional trowel-and-shovel type, he immediately joined a group exploring a farmstead further down the road which might follow the same pattern as at Glaumbaer.
Between the farm buildings and the hayfields is a steeply pitched mound where tradition says turf houses have stood since the Viking Age. On top of the last turf house, abandoned in the 1940s, the current farmers have dumped their refuse, including several hundred sheep that were destroyed in 1991 because of disease. When Durrenberger arrived, the team had already taken test cores, punching a thin steel tube down into the soil and pulling out a cylindrical sample. By looking for layers of charcoal, bone, or peat ash in the soil samples, they can see when people built the first house on this spot.
"In Iceland you have the date built into the soil," explains Durrenberger, "because you also have layers of volcanic tephra."
Tephra has a different color and texture from soil or sand. When you run the edge of your trowel over it, it rings out, as if you had tapped a glass bottle. It feels grittier, almost spiky on your fingertips or, if you're not certain, on your tongue. Even I could spot the most obvious lines: a chalky white layer from an eruption in 1104 and a honey-brown one from either of two eruptions 2000 and 4000 years ago. If you see no charcoal, bone, or ash above a honey-brown line, you know no people have lived here—when Viking explorers discovered Iceland, they found no indigenous people.
If, on the other hand, you find charcoal, bone, or ash near the white 1104 layer, the spot is worth investigating further.
This mound showed signs of occupation down to at least 1104. When Durrenberger arrived, he began digging a one-meter-square test pit with a well-sharpened shovel.
After a long windy day of digging or dancing with the remote sensing device, we met around the coffee table in the local schoolhouse, which we had turned into an archaeological station. The midnight sun was tinting the mountains pink and, although tired, we weren't yet ready to call it a day.
The hole Paul Durrenberger dug into a farm mound here in 2002 is still the talk of the excavation crew. He started digging another as soon as he arrived this summer. Photo from 2002 Glaumbaer dig, Courtesy Paul Durrenberger
"What did you find in that hole?" I asked Durrenberger. "What was the most exciting thing?"
"Well, we found fishbone," he answered. "We found lots of shells. Some teeth. A nail. A lot of iron slag. Sheep bones. A piece of coal that had to have been imported, because Iceland has no coal. We found a clothing fastener of some sort made of wire. Looks like a ram's head. And a bone bead. That was interesting. It had two rings carved on it." He was still in layers from the 19th century. He had a long way to go to reach the Viking Age, and "exciting" was not the word to describe his work. "It's the top of a trash heap, that's what it is," he said.
"Archaeology, like any science, seeks to find new things," Durrenberger continued. "If we knew there was a house here before 1100, we wouldn't have to dig.
"By and by we'll have a story to tell about this valley," he added, "and it will be orderly and neat. What people don't usually see is all the confusion and chaos that goes into getting that story."
Check back in two weeks for Dispatch 2, as the field team identifies--and begins to uncover--the remains of a Viking-age house!
Nancy Marie Brown is a former editor of Research/Penn State. Her current book, "Voyage of a Viking Woman", is about a woman who explored Greenland and Atlantic Canada and settled at Glaumbaer in Iceland a thousand years ago.
