Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Page 106

Orri Vésteinsson, Thomas H. McGovern, Christian Keller
saga accounts were written down 200-
300 years after the settlement period they
describe, and were certainly shaped by
later medieval factional biases and polit-
ical struggles (Sveinbjörn Rafnsson
1974; Adolf Friðriksson & Orri
Vésteinsson in press). The exact mix of
transmitted tradition and later interpola-
tion has been extensively debated (e.g.
Jakob Benediktsson 1978, Durrenberger
1991, Vésteinn Ólason 1998), and the
consensus appears to be that while 12th-
13th century descriptions of the 9th-10th
century show an awareness that social
and environmental conditions were dif-
ferent in the settlement age, these later
sources are in need of extensive testing
against other types of evidence. While
they can not be used as primary sources
for the landnám period, medieval histori-
cal writings like the Book of Settlements
(Jakob Benediktsson (ed.) 1968, 31-397,
translated in The Book of Settlements,
Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards transl.
Manitoba 1972) and the sagas may thus
provide an impression of what the later
authors thought had changed since settle-
ment times, and thus indicate areas for
further investigation.
The highlighted portions of the text
quoted above illustrate some of these
recurring themes:
- Weather was different somehow (out-
door winter grazing, but in other
sources there is also mention of hard
times)
- Deforestation. Forest once stretched
from “mountains to the sea”
(íslendingabók, Jakob Benediktsson
(ed.) 1968, 5)
- Rich strandage. Driftwood and
stranded whales were more common
- Abundance of wild foods, unwary
animals were vulnerable
- Large, complex households under
direct chiefly control were common
- Cultural landscape was created by
chieftains
Some of these issues are really only a
matter of common sense, especially
deforestation, which was still taking
place in the high-middle ages. Other
issues, particularly those which relate to
aspects of the environment not affected
by humans like climate and strandage,
belong more clearly to a conception of
things having been generally better (or at
least more dramatic) “back then”. To
what extent this idea is linked to the per-
sistent suggestion in the sagas that the
settlement process was dominated by
chieftains who had control over a large
number of people, is unclear. It is tempt-
ing to think that this suggestion owes
more to political developments in Iceland
(and possibly also in Greenland) in the
13th century, when great magnates where
taking over control of larger and larger
regions, superseding an earlier system of
political fragmentation (Orri Vésteinsson
2000a, 238-46). Even so, it is still possi-
ble that at least some of these themes rep-
resent memories of the settlement
process. In particular it seems worth-
while to investigate the proposition that
the settlement and subsistence systems
were created by chieftains or great men:
whether the colonies were made up of a
large number of isolated independent
104