Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Page 101

Enduring Impacts: Viking Age Settlement in Iceland and Greenland
Thoroddsen 1899-1905, 1908-1922,
1916, Sigurður Þórarinsson 1944). In the
past two decades, thanks to the work of
many scholars based in both Europe and
North America, a substantial amount of
new evidence has been collected by
archaeologists and environmental scien-
tists and fresh interpretations of regional
settlement, political organization, envi-
ronmental impact, and response to cli-
mate change have been offered (Amorosi
et al. 1996, 1997, Batey 1987, 1991,
Barlow et al. 1997, Buckland 2000,
Buckland et al. 1996, Dugmore &
Buckland 1991, McGovern 2000,
McGovem et al. 1988, McGovem &
Ogilvie 2000, Morris et al. 1995, Orri
Vésteinsson 1998, 2000b, Simpson 1997,
Simpson & Barret 1996).
Interdisciplinary approaches combining
documents, diverse proxy climate data,
archaeobotany, zooarchaeology (both
vertebrate and invertebrate), settlement
survey, tephrochronology, soil
microstructure and regional geomorphol-
ogy are now becoming commonplace,
aided by the NABO regional research
cooperative.
However, the effective integration of
these diverse data sets remains challeng-
ing, and the appropriate weighting to be
given to different categories of evidence
is often unclear. Different disciplines
bring different agendas to the investiga-
tion of common problems, and there is a
danger of producing overly simplistic
explanations of complex phenomena by
privileging environmental or social
explanations, or taking grand evolution-
ary or local historical perspectives
according to the scholarly fashion preva-
lent among the investigators. As others
have observed (Crumley ed. 1994, Baleé
ed. 1998, Kirch & Hunt eds.1997), there
is a need for a new perspective that can
incorporate politically driven human
strategizing, long term landscape evolu-
tion, and what we increasingly recognize
as sharp, threshold crossing discontinu-
ities in both global climate and human
social organization.
This paper investigates the complex
problem of early settlement in Iceland
and Greenland, drawing comparisons
between the two Nordic colonies in an
attempt to better understand the origins
of persistent patterns in settlement, polit-
ical power, and economic organization.
The available evidence from the two
countries is both dissimilar and of differ-
ent quality, and while significant source
problems remain unsolved in both cases
and many gaps remain unbridgeable, dis-
tinct pattems emerge when the two data
sets are compared.
In Iceland settlement pattems seem to
have been extremely stable, with the
majority of farms having continuous
habitation on the same site from very
early times to the present day. This
means that early archaeological deposits
are as a rule not easily accessible and the
majority of early excavated sites are
unsuccessful settlements of one kind or
another. While the archaeological record
is therefore skewed towards the study of
early failiures, the pattems of settlement
themselves remain as evidence for early
land-use decisions. In addition medieval
Iceland is rich in documentary evidence
with a wealth of narrative sources from
the high middle ages and a substantial
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