Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 91

ICELANDIC FARMHOUSE EXCAVATIONS: FlELD METHODS AND SITE CHOICES
results.
Another aspect of this approach is the
lack of interest in the history of the build-
ing or the material culture associated
with it. The farmhouses excavated in
Iceland until the 1970s were primarily
given meaning in a typological-evolu-
tionary context, the layout and date being
the only aspects that importance was
attached to. However increased experi-
ence and increasingly meticulous field
methods were starting to create an aware-
ness of other issues from the 1950s
onwards. In his report of the excavation
of Gröf Gestsson (1959) considers at
length a variety of implications of the
revealed structures and draws heavily on
historical and ethnographic evidence to
interpret the function of different struc-
tures. This emphasis on function was to
become more and more noticeable in
archaeological reports of the 1950s,
1960s and 1970s and this in tum led to a
greater care being taken in the excavation
of individual features which could throw
light on such considerations. Issues like
the identification and function of bath-
houses (baðstofur) and the nature and
role of pit houses - first identified at
Hvítárholt in 1963-67 - were to become
prominent in archaeological debate in the
1960s and 1970s (e.g. Ólafsdóttir 1974;
Gestsson 1976). Some of the issues
raised in such debates required more
careful examination of the features under
discussion - not least their history of use
- making the inadequacy of current exca-
vation methods more and more obvious.
Fig. 5. A baulk left for tephrochronological analysis in the excavation of Skallakot in 1939.
From Stenberger ed. 1943, 35.
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