Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 35

ZOOARCHAEOLOGY, HlSTORY AND LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY AT FlNNBOGASTAÐIR IN THE 18TH CENTURY
Mvvatn 1712 Revkiadalshr. 1712 Árneshr. 1706
Farms 18 61 35
Milking Cows 66 199 50
Milkewes 962 2323 322
wether/old wether 680 1532 132
total 1708 4054 504
Major stock per farm 95 66 14
Table 2. Comparison of livestock in three regions based on historical records.
inland higher altitude). It seems clear that
while all three districts kept the same mix
of stock, both absolute numbers of ani-
mals per farm and the proportion of stock
maintained dififer across 18th century
northem Iceland.
Not only do the farms in the NW keep
far fewer domestic animals, but their mix
is tilted much more heavily towards food
production rather than wool production,
with a proportionally higher percentage
of milk cows and milking ewes relative
to wethers. Sturla Friðriksson (1972)
estimated that under conditions of tradi-
tional Icelandic agriculture (before the
mid 19th century) it took the product of 9
ewes to sustain one adult, with 6 ewes
equaling one cow. If we use these figures
as a rough guide, it is possible to show
that in the Ámes district the total number
of animals could not possibly sustain the
number of people actually living on the
farms in 1706, but the number of domes-
tic animals in the Mývatn and
Reykjahlíðar districts should have been
able to sustain the number of people that
were living in the area.
Further analysis indicates that only
about 26 - 30 % of income for farms in
Ámes in 1706 were based on agriculture
while the ratio is much higher for
Mývatn - and Reykjahlíðar districts,
about 60% in 1712 (Edvardsson 2003).
These analyses indicate that the people of
Ámes district in the early 18th century
could not live on agriculture alone and
must have based their income on
resources not fully quantified in the land
registry or any other historical source.
Finnbogastaðir in the Jarðabók Land
Register
In the 1706 land registry Finnbogastaðir
appeared as a fairly typical farm in its
district, valued at 16 hundreds, which
was a mid-range farm for the NW area.
Compared to the rest of Iceland the farm
would be classified among the poorer
farms (Appendix 1).
The farm values are somewhat prob-
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