Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.1998, Page 46

Adolf Friðriksson & Orri Vésteinsson
logical site. According to this legis-
lation all man-made structures and
traces of human activity older than
100 years are archaeological sites and
have statutory protection as such. In
addition, the definition also includes
any spatially definable areas which
have some kind of cultural signi-
ficance, usually sites which some part-
icular piece of folklore is attached to,
but also places where particular actions
or events have habitually taken place,
such as assembly sites or sites where
turf was laid out for drying. The data-
base, although primarily directed
towards archaeological sites in the usu-
al sense, also includes information on
sites in this latter group.
The design of the database is
founded on three key premises:
• The archaeology of Iceland belongs
to a single cultural period with no
fundamental changes in resource
utilisation or technology occurring
from the settlement in the late 9th
century to the late 19th century.
• A significant feature of this culture
is the stability of the settlements,
with the majority of sites contain-
ing remains of continuous habita-
tion for more than 1000 years and
with limited changes to the farm-
ing units from as far back as writ-
ten records can be relied on.
• The vast majority of sites now visi-
ble on the surface date from the
19th century and are significant to
the conditions of the 19th century
economy.
On these grounds it becomes possible
to include in the database information
about the context of each site. This is
done by grouping the sites into
economic units. A division of the
country into farming units in 1847 is
used as the underlying structure of the
database and this allows non site-
specific information (i.e. on vegeta-
tion, livestock, demography, land-
ownership, land valuation etc.) to be
included in the database. Each site can
therefore be viewed in isolation, in its
context as a part of a farming unit and
against a variety of environmental,
economic and historical data.
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