Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Page 119

Enduring Impacts: Viking Age Settlement in Iceland and Greenland
exceptionally large central household
probably consisting largely of paid or
unfree labor, and coordinated by a formal
administration after the first bishop’s
arrival ca AD 1127.
It would appear that several different
settlement trajectories could be followed
by powerful magnates in the later Middle
Ages, and these may be rooted in a
greater complexity of initial settlement
pattern at landnám than anticipated by a
narrow interpretation of the “Skallagrímr
effect”. As we shall see similar patterns
are found in medieval Iceland which
strengthen the impression of complex
processes at work in shaping the settle-
ments of the two islands.
Icelandic Settlement Patterns
Unlike Greenland there is nowhere in
Iceland direct access to a medieval, let
alone settlement period, landscape. Most
habitable lowland areas remain in agri-
cultural use and those areas that have
been abandoned at one time or another
are as a rule marginal and untypical of
the settlement structure as a whole.
However, by viewing the existing settle-
ment structure as a relic of decisions
made in the settlement period and by
making use of the rich documentary evi-
dence which has survived from the Late
Middle Ages and early modem times to
“peel away” the effects of post-landnám
settlement changes, it is possible to build
a coherent picture of the initial settlement
pattern. This can only be done in detail
in areas where archaeological surveys
have been carried out; where possible
early sites are known, and where
medieval charter bounds have been
traced in the field and compared to the
modern evidence. This sort of systemat-
ic surveying has only been undertaken in
Iceland since 1994 but already consider-
able evidence has been collected from
several different regions, among them
Borgarijörður, Vestur-Barðastrandar-
sýsla, Eyjaljörður, Fljótsdalshérað and
Grafningur (see Fig. 1).
These data are in many important
aspects different from the Greenlandic
ones. In particular, assessments of which
farm-sites derive from the landnám-peri-
od are usually not based on archaeologi-
cal remains but on circumstantial and
often less secure evidence like property
value, size and shape of the farmland,
and associations with a church or chapel.
Thus a statement that a given farmstead
dates from the landnám-period is often
only based on it having a high property
value, that it covers a variety of good
land (i.e. rich meadow, summer and win-
ter pasture, access to sea or freshwater
fishing et c.) and is shaped so that it is
likely that neighboring properties were
carved from it (particularly when these
have a less variety or quality of land) and
that there was a church attached to the
farmstead (the argument being that
churches or chapels were built for more
or less every independent farm in the
country in the early llth century, giving
an idea of settlement patterns a century
and a half after the landnám - Orri
Vésteinsson 2000a, 45-57). Furthermore
the locations of heathen burials can give
indications of settlements in the 9th-1 Oth
centuries. It is however exceptional that a
large enough number of burials has been
found in a single area to give indications
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