Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 40

Ragnar Edvardsson, Sophia Perdikaris, Thomas H. McGovern, Noah Zagor & Matthew Waxman
resources. In the Ámes area most farms
had access to abundant driftwood and
stranding and some had access to salmon
and trout rivers. However, as the
Finnbogastaðir Jarðabók entry above
indicates, by the 18th century most of
these access rights had been acquired by
a variety of distant secular and ecclesias-
tical land owners (note that strandage
rights were mentioned as a point of con-
flict in the Jarðabók account). Sealing
(from the zooarchaeological evidence
directed at harbor seal pupping beaches)
could provide small farmers with both
rich meat and saleable pelts, but a major
intensification of sealing effort would be
likely to simply drive the local harbor
seal colonies to extinction or cause them
to relocate in less accessible areas. The
same problem limited the potential for
expansion of sea bird exploitation.
Gathering of molluscs (especially mus-
sels) was a low risk, low investment
strategy which could be pursued by chil-
dren and the elderly, but which produced
only a small volume of low value meat
(shellfish were traditionally regarded as
famine food in many areas of Iceland).
While a range of wild food certainly sup-
plemented the demonstrably inadequate
household provisioning provided by agri-
culture, the only area which would be
likely to repay intensification of effort by
both producing more food for the tenant
household and potentially providing a
saleable product would be fishing for
gadids or sharks.
Marine Landscape Archaeology,
Environmental Archaeology, and
Economic History
The statistical analysis of the land reg-
istry data and the analysis of the bone
data when placed in the context of coping
strategies of a severely stressed local
population may explain why fish, espe-
cially the Atlantic cod, was the main ele-
ment in the economy of the farm as
reconstructed by zooarchaeology. As
suggested by the element distribution
patterns and size reconstructions,
Atlantic cod probably played a "dual"
role for the farmers at Finnbogastaðir.
The larger portion of the catch would be
for domestic use and a small portion
would be sold at markets to generate the
cash income needed by these fisher-farm-
ers. The nature of the shark fisheries is
less clear ffom the zooarchaeology due to
problems of preservation and attrition,
and a single archaeofauna (from what is
essentially a limited test trench) cannot
shed much light on the cultural landscape
and the spatial organization of resource
use. Additional excavations aimed at
better understanding the nature and lay-
out of fishing stations combined with
regional landscape survey may allow a
better understanding of the processes
behind the formation of the archaeofauna
sampled at Finnbogastaðir in 1990.
Archaeological surveys and excava-
tion on farms and fishing sites in the
Ámes and neighboring Kaldrananes dis-
tricts have shown that there is a regulari-
ty in the location of fishing sites in the
landscape. All farms in both areas, except
for those located inland have a heimrœði
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