Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Síða 86

Orrj Vésteinsson
Erlingsson gives a detailed account of his
activities on a day to day basis, as well as
describing his finding alongside meas-
ured drawings and photographs of the
excavations - the fírst use of photography
in Icelandic archaeology. Erlingsson’s
approach was to select sites with little
overburden, in some cases already par-
tially or completely uncovered by ero-
sion. He then removed the soil from
inside the buildings and identifíed inter-
nal divisions, entrances, hearths and
benches. He found few artefacts and
even when he did he notes them only
rarely in his reports.
In 1896 Daniel Bruun did fieldwork
for the fírst time in Iceland. He was a
seasoned fieldworker and an accom-
plished surveyor and draughtsman who
left detailed and accurate records of his
excavations. Excavation was however
not his main method - like Kaalund,
Vigfússon and Jónsson, he concentrated
on locating sites and describing their
physical layout. His basic approach to
excavation was much the same as
Erlingsson's - to uncover the buildings by
removing the soil infilling the space
between the normally upstanding walls.
Unlike Erlingsson Bruun was undaunted
by the removal of large volumes of earth,
not doubt because he seems to have had
much greater resources and was able to
hire workers to carry out the actual phys-
ical work. Although descriptions of the
fieldwork do not exist it seems that he
was able to spend much longer at each
site than any of his predecessors. His
two main excavations in Iceland, Gásir in
1907 and Hofstaðir in 1908, have both
been re-excavated in recent years and
Bruun's field methods are as a result
quite well understood. The following
description is primarily based on obser-
vations of his technique made at
Hofstaðir.
Bruun began by defining the excava-
tion area, typically a square covering the
inside of the building in question. The
workers would begin by digging down
on to the tops of the walls and once they
was certain they had found the turf con-
struction they would follow this inwards
until they found the inside-edge of the
wall. It is the nature of turfwalls to bulge
and collapse and the difference between
the actual wall and collapsed material
from it can often be very difficult to dis-
tinguish. As a result Bruun's workers
often cut well into the walls, removing
large sections of them before getting to
their base. At Hofstaðir the walls at the
southem and northern ends of the build-
ings are very badly truncated by the 1908
excavation whereas in the middle the
walls were nearly intact. The long walls
of this building curve so that it is consid-
erably narrower towards the ends, sug-
gesting that the predefined excavation
area was a square, defined by the appar-
ent width of the building in the middle,
resulting in considerable damage to the
walls at the ends. Both at Hofstaðir and
Gásir the suspicion arises that once
Bmun had laid out the excavation area
and given orders to his workers, he did
not himself supervise the excavation but
retumed only when the soil infilling the
structures had been removed as per his
instructions. At Hofstaðir this is indicat-
ed by the fact that the floor layers closest
to the walls have everywhere been
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