Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Page 115

Enduring Impacts: Viking Age Settlement in Iceland and Greenland
to caprine bones recovered may reflect
social variables as much as (or more
than) local environmental variables.
Where high quality pasture was avail-
able, it was reserved for a limited number
of cattle rather than a potentially far larg-
er number of sheep and goats. Despite
locally unfavorable conditions, cattle
were kept in some numbers even on
small farms more “rationally” run entire-
ly as sheep stations. In Greenland, while
cattle bones decline relative to caprine
bones in stratified collections from small
sites (W48), they remain stable at the
larger farms (W51, McGovern et al.
1996). In Iceland, the picture is again
more complex, and more samples from
closely spaced sites of diíferent size is
needed. However, current evidence sug-
gests that cattle to caprine bone ratios in
lceland may also track status as much as
local environment, and there is a general
tendency for cattle bone to be most com-
mon in the earliest phases of all sites
(Amorosi 1996).
Greenlandic settlement patterns
Thanks to the efforts of many generations
of field workers (Bruun 1918, Roussell
1941, Albrethsen & Keller 1986, Keller
1991, McGovem & Jordan 1982) we
have a largely complete picture of the
final distribution of farms in the two
major settlement areas in Greenland.
Figure 6 illustrates the southern portion
of the smaller Western Settlement, with
unweighted von Theissen polygons
imposed over a map showing the 200
meter contour (above which there are no
farms and little vegetation in the Western
Settlement area). The Western Settlement
pattem (frozen ca. AD 1350 by abandon-
ment) is marked by a series of linear
chains of farms at regular 2-3 km spacing
along the steep-walled fjords and the sys-
tem of glacial valleys radiating from
them. Exceptions to this spacing occur
"around the large farm sites W45 and W51
(Sandnes), which have greater than aver-
age distance from their neighbors. In the
case of W45, this spacing is probably
mainly an artifact of the destruction of
sites by post-medieval erosion, but in the
case of W51 Sandnes the spacing proba-
bly reflects medieval patterns. All
observers since Bruun’s day (1918) have
noted the close association of
Greenlandic farm ruins with patches of
grass-sedge plant communities, and in
fact the completeness of our archaeolog-
ical settlement map owes a great deal to
the continued fertilizing effect of the
Norse middens and dung concentrations
in producing highly visible green patches
in the arctic landscape. Several survey
projects have mapped the distribution of
pasture vegetation in this part of the
Westem Settlement (Christensen 1991,
McGovem & Jordan 1982), allowing
rough quantifícation of the amount of
pasture contained within the von
Theissen polygon territories. Figure 7
graphs this reconstructed pasture area
against the floor area of known cattle
byres (which provide a rough proxy for
number of cattle regularly kept per farm,
see McGovem 1992a for discussion).
Large pastures appear to be associated
with large cattle byres, suggesting that
cattle raising was preferred over more
intensive sheep and goat raising. The ani-
mal bone collections from these sites
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