Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Page 56

Bruno Berson
upper end leads into a very small room -
too small to be a barn - which opens to
the side into what could have been a large
enclosure where hay was stacked. Here
also could upright slabs be observed and
it was estimated that the byre had room
for 18 heads of cattle (Þorsteinn
Erlingsson 1899).
Both Áslákstunga innri and undir
Lambhöfða exhibit the same arrange-
ment of buildings as the more fully exca-
vated sites in Þjórsárdalur, i.e. Stöng,
Gjáskógar and Sámsstaðir, and from this
typological resemblance it has been
inferred that these sites must also be from
the middle ages, abandoned either in the
1 lth or the 13th centuries.
Limitations of the assemblage
Out of some 50 excavated medieval sites
in Iceland, byres have only been investi-
gated or observed in 13 cases. Three of
these were not really excavations and the
byre at Stöng is only partially preserved,
leaving only 9 sites with fully document-
ed byres. This limited number is not an
indication that byres were not used as
universally as one might think. On the
contrary there is every reason to believe
that byres were found at every farm. The
relative scarcity of exavated byres is due
mainly to research conditions. On the
one hand investigators have always been
interested primarily in the dwellings and
have in many cases failed to excavate
ruins which almost certainly are the
remains of outhouses. Examples of this
are found at sites like Skallakot, Isleifs-
staðir, Grelutóttir, Granastaðir and
Klaufanes. On the other hand the fre-
quent arrangement of locating the byre
some distance from the dwellings has
meant that the byres either cannot be
found because of aeolian deposition or
subsequent building activity or they have
disappeared through erosion. Examples
of the former are e.g. Reykjavík,
Bessastaðir, Hofstaðir, Viðey, Kúabót
and Stóraborg; the last is the prime exam-
ple.
Another limitation of the data is related
to the uneven distribution of the byres.
All the excavated byres are found in the
southern part of the country, a large part
in a small area in upland Ámessýsla.
Again this reflects the choices of excava-
tors more than anything else - it reflects
the central position of Þjórsárdalur in
Icelandic arecaheology as well as the
state of communications in Iceland for
much of the 20th century which made
large scale excavations far from
Reykjavík difficult. For this reason the
analysis of Icelandic byres presented
here really only holds for the southem
part of the country.
Plan and shape of the byre
In discussing the byre he had excavated
at Gjáskogar, Kristján Eldjám comment-
ed that it had the typical shape of a
medieval Icelandic byre (Kristján Eldjárn
1965). What is this typical shape?
All the byres known from Iceland share a
range of similarities. They are always
oblong structures ranging in width from
3,5 m to 4 m. The only exception is
Hvítárholt where the byre was 5 m in
width, although the excavator did warn
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