Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Page 93

Brattahlíð reconsidered
with the church farms, they formed what
could be called chieftain and church farm
complexes.
As seen on the distribution map, some
of these complexes are easily noticed,
like ruin groups 0 1 and 2, 0 28 and
29/29a, 0 64 and 66 and 0 111 and 221.
But when knowing what to look for, it
was possible to locate a total of 11 com-
plexes in the entire Eastem Settlement.
A few of the complexes were difficult
to fmd; for instance the complex in
Narsaq, consisting of the Dýrnes church
farm (0 18) and the farm 0 17. In this
case, the presumed chieftain farm was
destroyed during the 19th century due to
the building of the modem town Narsaq
(founded in 1830). Old records state that
the farm in Narsaq was very Iarge (see
Ostermann 1944, 127, note 92, and
Sigurður Breiðljörð 1836, 36). The vast
and grassy meadows of this area must
have made it one of the very best places
for Norse husbandry in all of Greenland,
and a natural place to fmd a chieftain
farm.
Another puzzling complex was the
famous Hvalsey church farm (0 83) and
the nearby farm (0 83a). The 0 83a farm
was, in contrast to the Hvalsey church
farm, not discovered until 1935 when
Roussell conducted excavations in the
area (Roussell 1941, 34-41). Roussell
interpreted the site as a dairy farm, since
no dwelling was found there. When visit-
ing the site in 1999, it was possible to
locate the dwelling however, making it a
regular farm site. The site is likely to be
among the large farms, when fully sur-
veyed (hopefully within the next few
years), but it is definitely larger and bet-
ter situated than the more ordinary
Hvalsey church farm.
The most difficult to locate, however,
was the Qinngua complex (0 39), with
the Leiðar church and Brattahlíð. For
some time, I was convinced that the
church farm in Qinngua (0 39) formed a
complex together with the nearby farm in
Qorlortoq (0 33). But this meant that
Brattahlíð would be the rather small farm
0 33 and this would not make sense
according to Norlund's criteria. When
surveying the Qinngua farm in 1999, I
suddenly realized that both the church
farm and the chieftain farm were there on
the same site, but as two separate hold-
ings (see fig. 5). The eastern holding with
the church would then be the Leiðar
church farm - and the large central one
the actual Brattahlíð farm.
Usually, the chieftain farms and the
church farms would be situated a few
kilometres apart, but in this case, the
location must have been so good that
both these farms could be in the same
place. The same phenomenon is also
noticed at the very large farm site 0 149
in Narsarsuaq in the Uunartoq fjord (see
Vebæk 1991). In Narsarsuaq, there seems
to be both a church farm and a very large
chieftain farm in the same area.
When excavating the site in 1945-48,
Vebæk believed that this place was the
Benedictine convent mentioned in
Bárðarsson's description of Greenland.
However, there is little evidence that this
place should be the convent, since it
appears to be just another chieftain and
church farm complex.
Finally, a few words about the Garðar
complex, situated at the end of the
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