Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 78

Orri Vésteinsson
association to the Sagas and the heathen
periodbefore 1000. Different excavators
had somewhat different agendas;
Þorsteinn Erlingsson (active in 1895)
was primarily interested in constructing a
house typology so that Norse remains in
America could be recognised; Daniel
Bruun (active 1896-1908) prioritised
sites he considered to be pagan temples
while Matthías Þórðarson (active mainly
in 1920s and 30s) dug farms considered
to be the abodes of famous saga person-
ages. Conspicuously absent from the tar-
get sites of the early fieldworkers are
sites associated with initial settlement,
the landnám farms. The early fíeldwork-
ers obviously selected single period sites
where they would not have to spend time
or energy on removing more recent
deposits. At Bergþórshvoll in 1926-28
Þórðarson was the first Icelandic excava-
tor who had to deal with more recent
remains overlying the deposits he was
really interested in. While Þórðarson's
excavation methods were neither meticu-
lous or particularly up to date for his time
he did excavate the whole farm mound
more or less equally badly, giving no less
attention to early modem layers than
medieval or allegedly Viking age ones.
By the 1930s Scandinavian settlement
archaeology had reached considerable
maturity, not least with extensive excava-
tions of 14th-15th century farmsteads in
Norse Greenland. This new field made
no distinctions between periods, empha-
sising in equal measure prehistoric and
medieval building customs and making
good use of modem ethnographic evi-
dence to inform the new theories. These
theories were evolutionist in character,
treating the development of domestic
architecture as a reflection of social and
economic change through the centuries.
Thus the theoretical conditions for an
interest in more recent archaeology had
been created by the 1930s and this, as
well as the growing influence of Marxist
thought on many Scandinavian historians
and archaeologists of the mid 20th centu-
ry, was the background for a definite shift
towards excavations of late medieval and
early modem sites in the post-war era.
In Iceland these new currents and the-
oretical frameworks were suddenly
revealed in 1939 with the joint Nordic
archaeological expedition to Þjórsárdalur
and Borgaríjörður (Stenberger ed. 1943).
The majority of the sites excavated were
at the time considered to have been aban-
doned around 1300, neatly filling the gap
between the later medieval Greenlandic
sites and the largely Viking age settle-
ments from Scandinavia.
While Kristján Eldjám, who was to
become the most influential Icelandic
archaeologist of the late 20th century,
received his field training in Greenland
and Þjórsárdalur his first independent
efforts are more reminiscent of earlier
times. His first site, Klaufanes excavated
in 1940 (see Hreiðarsdóttir this volume),
was selected because of its supposed
connection to a personage in one of the
sagas of Icelanders. It is however per-
haps significant that Eldjám also sug-
gested that the building was that of a pri-
mary settler, this first such claim in
Icelandic archaeological literature. In
1942 Eldjám excavated a min at Foma-
Lá on the grounds that it might be a
pagan temple - also a somewhat old fash-
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