Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Qupperneq 108

Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Qupperneq 108
Orrí Vésteinsson, Thomas H. McGovern, Christian Keller Calibrated C14 Qne Sigma Range - Earliest Contexts 1300 Years AD 1200 1100 E66 E168 1000 E75 900 800 700 - W51 E149 W48 W54 E294 7 r E17A GUS 1 1 I I : Carbon from Soil Sites Fig. 2. Radiocarbon dates for base layers of sites in the Eastern and Western Settlements of Norse Greenland. traces of cereals (e.g. Hordeum) begin to appear. In the south of Iceland this process was over with a new balance reached as soon as AD 920 (Margrét Hallsdóttir 1987, based on a dating of the Katla-R tephra - Hafliði Hafliðason et al. 1992). While the number of securely dated sites is still low, all the available evidence points to a rapid colonization following the establishment of the first settlements around 870 and complete deforestation in lowland areas before 920 in the south of the country at least. Even marginal areas were being exploited by the lOth century, to the extent that many of such early sites became abandoned before 1100, presumably on account of erosion which set in as a result of the for- est clearance (Sigurður Þórarinsson 1977). These results are in sharp contrast to the traditional model for the settlement process, illustrated by Olafur Lárusson (1944, 9-37) who saw the process as a gradual one with the slow filling in of the landscape with evenly sized farms from the 870s and well into the llth century. While more investigations are needed, current archaeological and paleo-envi- ronmental evidence both indicate a wide- spread human impact very early in the settlement process. In Greenland geophysical dates for early sites are less common (though a major new program of AMS dating is currently underway associated with the GUS project). Figure 2 presents a series of dates from the Eastern Settlement derived from soil columns and excavated sites (Andreasen 1982, Jakobsen 1991, McGovern et al. 1983, Vebæk 1991). These indicate the presence of Norse set- tlers in both coastal (E149, E17a) and inland (E66, E168, E294) locations at or before the traditional AD 985 landnám date. In the Westem Settlement, basal dates now published from both coastal (W48, W51) and inland farms (W54, GUS) are almost as early, and strongly suggest that both settlement areas saw Norse occupation within the first genera- 106
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Archaeologia Islandica

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