Explorations
Secrets of Ancient Iceland
Dispatch 3: Seeing the context
Haymaking is just about over here in northern Iceland, and as the farmers haul their round bales out of the fields, the 13 crew members of the Skagafjordur Archaeological Settlement Survey have been moving in. My part of the crew took the turf off a 750-square-meter section of hayfield just below the Glaumbaer Folk Museum in mid-July, and began scraping away the dirt to reveal the collapsed walls of a 40-meter-long Viking Age house abandoned before 1104.
Viking Age longhouse
At the same time a small contingent including Penn State anthropologist Paul Durrenberger, one of the principal investigators of this National Science Foundation-funded project, began digging test pits in nearby farm mounds. Day after day, the Glaumbaer group moved dirt, looking first for the chalky white tephra left by the eruption of Mount Hekla in 1104, and then for any sign of peat ash or bone or the mottled earthy colors of a turf wall under the tephra. I worked mostly on my knees in the shallow, wide holes, using a dustpan and trowel. (Or, as my Icelandic friends teased, a teaspoon.)
Other, more practiced diggers dug one meter-square test pits with shovels and screened the dirt looking for artifacts and bone. By studying the sheep bones, for instance, and finding out the ratio of lambs to ewes to wethers, scientists can tell if the household whose trash is being uncovered was a central one, managing its sheep for wool to export, or a dependent one whose herds were used for food.
The weather turned cold and rainy. The mountains disappeared in the fog. The exposed earth of Glaumbaer turned to muck. Still we moved dirt. I began to think the holes were endless, that the full buckets—like those in Walt Disney's "Fantasia"—were a wizard's spell out of whack
"Same hole, different day," Durrenberger would joke when we met at dinner. Or sometimes, "Same day, different hole."
It always seemed to be he who dug the deepest holes—one went almost 3 meters down, slender as a well, and had to be shored up with two-by-fours. I began to wonder: Was Durrenberger involved with the project just because he's a pro with a shovel?
"Paul's here," explained John Steinberg of UCLA's Cotsen Institute, the leader of our archaeological crew, "because sometimes we get so caught up in the turf and the tephra, in the logic of the archaeology, that we forget what questions we came here to answer."
In long dinner-table discussions, and well into the night in the team's computer lab (a room in a local school), Durrenberger, a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer, tries to put each day's hole into context.
Paul Durrenberger happily dug the deepest and nastiest test pits. Photo by John Steinberg
Ethnographers live with, observe, and talk to people to learn why they do what they do. When there are no people left of a culture, such as that of the Vikings in Iceland, there are still two ways to gain ethnographic information. First, you can study similar living cultures, an approach Durrenberger has already taken as far as it will go in work conducted years ago among the Lisu and Shan peoples in Northern Thailand. "The important thing about the society of medieval Iceland," he explains, "is that it was both highly stratified and had no state institutions to make that stratification work. That's why in the long run it failed. From the Lisu we know about societies that have no state institutions but are egalitarian, and from the Shan we know about societies that are highly stratified, but do have state institutions. What we don't have in today's world is a society that is both stratified and not a state, the way medieval Iceland was."
The second method is to examine what the culture left behind, such as the longhouse we are excavating at Glaumbaer and the signs of occupation seen in the lines of fireplace ash and other rubbish found in the holes on the other farms.
"When I'm out here using a shovel," Durrenberger said, "I'm seeing the same human systems I am when I'm out talking to people."
For medieval Iceland, Durrenberger has yet another source of ethnographic information: sagas written down in the 12th and 13th centuries that tell of the settlement of Iceland 200 or more years before. "Historians might see in the sagas a series of particular events," said Doug Bolender, a Northwestern University graduate student working on the project. "An ethnographer like Paul reads the sagas to learn about the structure of the institutions in the society."
The walls of the 18th-century turf house at the Glaumbaer Folk Museum. Photo by Sigridur Sigurdardottir, Byggdasafn Skagfirdinga
In Durrenberger's reading of the sagas, substantial inequality existed early on in Iceland, as opposed to the more egalitarian society that other scholars have described. Steinberg and Bolender asked Durrenberger to collaborate with them in Iceland, since economic inequality can be seen in how the pattern of settlement in an area changes over the years. According to this pattern, the initial settlers in this part of Skagafjord established large farms along the river. After a hundred years or so, Durrenberger says, "they created small farms on the margins of the large ones, renting out parcels to tenants who provided labor at crucial times like haymaking and the fall sheep round-up. This arrangement forced the dependents to provide for their own subsistence during the rest of the year, so that the large land-owners did not have to support them."
So far, the results of our digging confirm Durrenberger's hypothesis: the large farms are the oldest; then smaller farms crop up, clustered around the large ones, between the years 1000 and 1104.
But the Skagafjordur Archaeological Settlement Survey isn't yet over. While this year's field season is at an end, Steinberg and Durrenberger plan to return. And the ambiguous results of some of our holes call for more digging.For instance, high over the river, halfway to the mountains, just below a trout-filled lake, Steinberg asked Durrenberger to dig yet another hole in a farm mound. According to historical tax records uncovered by Bolender, this site was once a dependent farm called Medalheimur. "The story goes," says Steinberg, "that you can't eat the trout in the lake. Anyone who eats the trout dies. When you get a story like that, and a farm that drops out of the historical record, there's something going on. It's worth checking out."
The hole at Medalheimur isn't deep—just over half a meter down—but its walls are a puzzle of colorful striations. There are lines of pink peat ash, familiar from my eight days with a trowel digging out an ash pit beside the Viking Age longhouse at Glaumbaer (see Dispatch #2). Tephra from the eruption of Mount Hekla in 1104 shows up as a chalk-white line. Protruding from one corner at the bottom are a cluster of charcoal-covered stones that Steinberg and Durrenberger identified as a possible hearth. The hearthstones rest right on a dark line of tephra, which volcanologists say was deposited just after Iceland began to be settled in 870. "This is our time machine," Durrenberger says. "You're looking down at the earliest days of the settlement of Iceland."
Unfortunately, there's no sign in the hole of the bluish-gray tephra layer from the year 1000—so this hearth fire may have burned as early as 870 or as late as 1104. To get a firmer date, Steinberg will send a sheep bone, found just below the hearth, to a radiocarbon-dating lab.
"Until we get the date from the bone, we don't know the age of the house," says Steinberg. "We know it's earlier than 1104. If it's between 1000 and 1104, then it's a hjaleiga—a tenant farm—of Glaumbaer. If it's earlier than 1000, then we've got trouble."
The other farm mound holes seem to support the pattern Durrenberger predicted. Medalheimur might, or might not, fit. "It's the same in any science," Durrenberger says. "You get data to answer questions, but those data raise more questions. That's what keeps it exciting."
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 lived at Glaumbaer in Iceland a thousand years ago.
