Árbók Hins íslenzka fornleifafélags - 01.01.1972, Page 73

SÖGUALDARBYGGÐ í HVÍTÁRHOLTI
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The houses investigated are 10 in all, in the article termed as I-X (Fig. 3).
Three of these are halls of the common Viking Age shape, 5 are pit houses
also of a kind previously well known in the neighbouring countries from dif-
ferent periods of the Iron Age, not least the Viking period, but now for the
first time with certainty identified in Iceland. Of the two remaining houses
one was a combined byre and barn, the other not unlikely a barn.
The locality is situated on the top of an oblong, smoothly curved and not
very high hillock (Fig. 1), which rises from an extensive flat bog area near
the great glacier river Hvitá, which flows north of the hillock. Nevertheless,
access to water for daily use has not been too easy for the inhabitants of the
ancient farm. This circumstance probably was a disadvantage and may have
been one of the reasons why the place was given up.
House I (Figs. 4-7), the first house to be excavated is a pit house of the
type already mentioned. It is very markedly sunk or dug into the ground, the
floor at least 90 cm below contemporary surface. The house is curved at the
corners and measures 2,6x3,8 m. No signs of walls above original ground
level were visible. The roof seems simply to have rested on the edges of the
pit. In the SE-corner there is a primitive oven built of flat stones. A number
of post holes are along the walls and a few smaller holes here and there on
the floor. In the NW-corner a stone-covered channel or sewer leads through
the wall out into the free, as it seems in order to permit water to run easily
out of the house. The oven and the channel allow us to assume that the house
very likely should be identified as a bath-house. The small holes on the floor
may indicate posts supporting wooden benches, on which people sat or lay
while bathing. No entrance was observed, and this applies to all five pit houses.
Very likely people entered such houses through an opening in the roof.
House II (Figs. 8-9), is tentatively identified as a hay barn. It is orientated
N-S, size 3,8x10,0 m. The house is of a simple form. Some post holes are
along the walls, whic-h were built of sods of turf, cut from the bogs around
the hillock. In fact all walls seem to have been built of such sods. They all
contain a volcanic ash layer, which derives from an eruption from just before
900 A. D., therefore by geologists termed as the “settlement layer”. The ap-
pearance of this volcanic ash in the sods of the Hvítárholt walls shows that
they were cut from the bog a short time after the eruption, a fact which again
has something to tell about the age of the site. The north wall of the house
(II) was not observed for certain. Nor did the door, but the house seems to
have been rebuilt at least twice, since three different floor layers were ob-
served, while the dimensions of the house were the same all the time. — In
the west end of the house there is a regularly laid collection of stones, an
arrangement possibly intended to drain the floor. A very simple fireplace, in
fact not much more than a big flat stone with obvious traces of intense heat-
ing, was observed in the north end of the house. Some traces of hay along the
walls may suggest that this house was a barn.
House III (Figs. 10-15), a hall, badly damaged because House II had been
built on its site. However, the main features of the hall are clear enough.
The two ends of it could not be exactly located, but the length of the hall was
at least 19 m. The width is 6,25 m in the middle but decreases towards both
ends, a characteristic often observed in such houses. A hearth, the long-fire,
is in the middle of the floor, about 2 m long, in the shape of a very shallow
stone-set trough, with a fire-pit at one end. There are a few post holes near
the middle of the house, other parts being damaged as stated before. Along
both walls there are relatively wide earthen benches or sleeping bunks (set),
a little higher than the floor between them. Close to the walls there are rows