Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 63

John M. Steinberg
NOTE ON ORGANIC CONTENT OF
TURF WALLS IN SKAGAFJÖRÐUR,
ICELAND
As part of the work ofthe Skagafjörður Archaeological Settlement Survey (SASS)
we ran 80 loss-on-ignition (Lol) tests to assess biases in identifying buried high-
ly organic turf walls. In these tests, the organic content of soil samples was
bumed off to determine the percentage of organic material. These tests provide
the data for organic content profiles that allow the assessment of archaeological-
ly preserved turf walls from Viking Age and Late Norse Iceland (874-1500 AD).
It would appear that the leaching of organic material out of turf walls is initially
quite substantial but that the organic movement due to eluviation reaches equilib-
rium. The results suggest that small buried turf walls may have Iost most of their
organic content, but that larger turf walls (greater than 25 cm high) may retain
their elevated organic content. While this study is inconclusive, in the future Lol
studies of turf walls could yield useful information about early Icelandic building
techniques.
John M. Steinberg, UCLA, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, A-210 Fowler
Museum, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1510, jmstein@ucla.edu,
http://sass.ioa.ucla.edu
Introduction
Turf, from the upper levels of peat bogs,
provided the farmers and pastoralists of
Viking Age and Late Norse (874-1500
AD) Scandinavia with an ideal building
material (contributions to Myhre,
Stoklund and Gjærder; 1982 Urbanczyk
1999. Turfprocurement and construction
methods in Medieval Iceland are well
understood (e.g., Berson 2002;
Sigurðardóttir 1998; Smith 1995). The
volcanic tephra layers incorporated into
turf walls have been routinely used for
Keywords: geoarchaeology, Viking Age, peat, leaching,
eluviation, structures, Loss on Ignition (Lol)
dating (Vésteinsson 2000) and therefore
changes in construction techniques, espe-
cially for the earliest phases, are well
understood. However, the post-deposi-
tional behavior of buried turf in archaeo-
logical contexts is not well understood.
The tests described below were per-
formed to see if it were possible, practi-
cal, and productive to quantify the organ-
ic content of turf walls in buried archae-
ological contexts.
These tests were run as part of the
work of the Skagafjörður Archaeological
Settlement Survey (SASS). The SASS
Archaeologia Islandica 3 (2004) 61-70