Árbók Hins íslenzka fornleifafélags - 01.01.1980, Page 109

GUÐRÚN SVEINBJARNARDÓTTIR, 1*.C. BUCKLAND, A.J. GERRARD, J.R.A. GREIG,
D. PERRV, D. SAVORY AND MJÖLL SNÆSDÓTTIR
EXCAVATIONS AT STÓRABORG,
A PALAEOECOLOGICAL APPROACH
The identification of some plant and animal remains from archaeological
sites has been carried out for over a century. Until research began on deposits
in York, however, the work of palaeoecologists — biologists studying past en-
vironments — and archaeologists involved in the excavation of mediæval sites
seldom overlapped. Whilst the model projected in the first of the York en-
vironmental archaeology papers (Buckland et al., 1974) is open to criticism, it
did provide a starting point for research of this kind (c.f. Buckland, 1975;
Girling and Greig, 1977; Kenward et al., 1978). The reconstruction of largely
natural environments, using data from pollen analysis, plant macrofossils and
insect remains, had been carried out by Kelly and Osborne (1965) at Shustoke
in Central England, but most work on archaeological deposits concerns only
individual aspects, for example, the study of plant macrofossils from Hedeby
(Behre, 1969).
Modern comparative studies of plant and animal assemblages are frequent-
ly insufficiently detailed for interpreting the fossil record, and archaeological
deposits often represent conditions which do not now exist, leading to pro-
blems in the interpretation of their fossil content. Despite such difficulties,
considerable advances in interpretation have been made by the close coopera-
tion of archaeologists and palaeoecologists and it is often possible to increase
considerably the amount of useful information recovered from an ar-
chaeological site (c.f. Buckland, 1979).
Previous Research
In Iceland, Holocene fossil plants are referred to by Thoroddsen (1914)
and, in the 1930s, Henriksen identified fossil insects from interglacial deposits
at Elliðaárvogur (Þorkelsson, 1935). In purely archaeological contexts, the
team, which excavated several sites in Þjórsárdalur in 1939, combined some
palaeoecology, principally palynology, with both archaeology and geology
(Stenberger, 1943). The farms in Þjórsárdalur had been destroyed by the erup-