Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2002, Page 125

Enduring Impacts: Viking Age Settlement in Iceland and Greenland
larger parts of its area would have been
covered in forest at the time of the land-
nám. One explanation of this pattern
could be that during the initial phase,
while people were still establishing the
livestock economy and exploring the
land, they tended to settle in groups or at
least clusters which allowed for co-oper-
ation and provided security against any
real or imagined threats. Once this sort
of clustered settlement had been estab-
lished, a prospective leader who could
not establish direct control over his fel-
low settlers might instead opt to create a
new settlement on adjacent, as yet unoc-
cupied land, which even if it was of less-
er quality could support a much Iarger
household simply by making it larger
than any of the farms in the original set-
tlements. Hjaltastaðir was clearly a very
successful settlement but other similar
ones, like Stóra Steinsvað and Hóll
which also had churches associated with
them probably belong to the same phase
in the settlement process.
This particular district is dominated
by its two main settlement clusters and
the three large simple settlements but
inland from these there is a small number
of small farms of fairly even size and
economic capability. These units do not
look like they were established by people
who chose to limit the size of their hold-
ings in this manner. On the contrary they
look like planned settlements, i.e. settle-
ments defined and allocated by someone
like the local leader at Hjaltastað who
wanted to fill the neighboring landscape
with dependant tenants. Each of these
planned settlements can support a single
household but they are seriously restrict-
ed in their access to a number of
resources, indicating their secondary
standing: Hreimsstaðir and Rauðholt
have hardly any summer pasture and had
to rent it from others, Hrjótur and Ána-
staðir have little meadows, poor hay
fields and bad pasture for cattle and hors-
es (Birna Gunnarsdóttir et al. 1998, 10-
17).
In Barðaströnd and Rauðasandur on the
northern shores of the great bay
Breiðafjörður in Western Iceland the
landscape is very different from that of
Hjaltastaðaþinghá. With very limited
lowland the settlements are strung along
the strip of land between mountainside
and seashore, normally only I -2 km wide
but intersected by somewhat broader
alluvial plains. This area is not known as
particularly favorable for agriculture but
it has excellent access to a large variety
of wild resources, in particular seal, wild
birds and eggs in the cliffs of Látrabjarg
and fish on rich off-shore fishing
grounds. In many ways one would think
that this would have been an ideal place
for the first arrivals in Iceland to start out.
In fact 13th century tradition has it that
one of the earliest explorers overwintered
in Vatnsijörður which was full of fish and
that he and his crew spent all summer
hunting and fishing and forgot to procure
winter fodder for their livestock which
subsequently all died in the following
winter (Jakob Benediktsson (ed.) 1968,
38-39). The three places in this region
best suited for early settlements, where
easy access to hunting coincides with
good meadows, each later became domi-
nated by a large complex settlement,
which unlike the complex settlements in
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