Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 96

Orri Vésteinsson
increasing experience and knowledge
of the excavators resulted in more
attention being paid to individual fea-
tures, calling for their separate record-
ing and a clear defínition of their rela-
tionship to other features. As individ-
ual buildings formed the basic strati-
graphic units, such features had to be
treated as sub-units, often resulting in
complex strings of definitions (e.g.
"rebuilt drain under third floor of the
shortened house no. 9") which were
difficult to keep track of in the records
and almost impossible to ensure were
uniformly applied, e.g. in locational
descriptions of artefacts.
- In the same vein, increasing attention
was being given to features and
deposits which did not belong to par-
ticular buildings. These had to be
given names (e.g. "eastem midden")
outside the numerical order of build-
ings, and were frequently difficult to
relate to the building sequence, not
least because they often were treated
as single stratigraphic units (although
not deserving a number) rather than a
series of units.
- In the early 1980s the first palaeoento-
mologists and zooarchaeologists start-
ed to work in Iceland, mostly in close
collaboration with Icelandic field
archaeologists. Their need for an
unambiguous context for their sam-
ples no doubt increased the pressure to
revise the excavation methodology.
By the beginning of the 1990s references
to "lists of layers" (jarðlagaskrá, man-
nvistarlagaskrá) begin to appear in inter-
im reports. These are not comprehensive
lists of stratigraphic units but primarily
deposits and accumulations as opposed
to stmctural remains and features. In
other words this was an attempt to sys-
tematically record the "soft" materials in
between the stones and slabs which were
Fig. 8. Open area excavation in Skálholt 2003. Fornleifastofnun Islands.
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