Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 108

Elín Ósk Hreiðarsdóttir
was from the Viking age. Therefore he
uses building typology to infer its age, a
method which seems to be a fairly new
departure in Icelandic archaeology at this
time.
Eldjárn said that the thin floor
layer(s) and the fact that almost no finds
were found proved that the skáli was
only inhabited for a short period. Eldjám
considered this, along with the facts that
a) The skáli was located where the Saga
(Svardæla) claimed that Klaufi's farm
stood; and b) an old riverbank was close
to the area and seems to have eroded
parts of the fields away, to be the proof
that he had found the skáli of Klaufi.
That is why he claimed the skáli could be
dated very accurately according to the
Saga and was built around 950. Besides
these facts Eldjárn said the skáli provid-
ed no new knowledge but rather just con-
firmed what was already known about
the houses the Vikings in Iceland.
The excavation in Klaufanes received
attention and among other things some
an article about it was printed in the
national newspaper Morgunblaðið in
1941.4 Eldjám’s attempt to confirm the
Sagas was well received among most
people and the drawing and photographs
from the excavation were used in new
publications of the Sagas that were print-
ed in 1956. For that publication the old
drawing of the skáli at Klaufanes was
updated and a doorway put on the long
wall (fig. 4). This seems to have been
done for the sole purpose of making the
skáli look more convincing (Islensk forn-
ritlX. 1956).
Critique of the Excavation
The excavation in Klaufanes has mainly
been criticized for the ideology behind
the work and how uncritically Eldjám
used the sagas in the excavation and
interpreting the results. Eldjám himself
later retracted some of his conclusions
about "the skáli of Klaufi" and said that
in fact the only real knowledge about the
skáli was that the shape of the building
indicated that it was from early times, the
lOth century and that the person who
wrote Svarfdæla obviously knew about
the skáli in Klaufanes and therefore con-
nected it to Klaufi.5
A lot has been said and written about
the problems of using archaeology to
seek blindly for confirmation of the
Sagas but that will not be discussed in
detail here.6 Still a few examples will be
mentioned where Eldjám uses both the
sagas and the archaeology to support
each other.
Eldjám starts his Klaufanes article
with a quotation from the Sagas describ-
ing how Klaufi built his farm down by
the river; because of the river's aggres-
sion towards the farm he was forced to
move it uphill. In Klaufanes an old river-
bank was visible west of the fields and it
looked like the bank had possibly eroded
part of the fields. The riverbank was still
4 "Skálarúst í Klaufanesi í Svarfaðardal: Merkilegar minjar frá söguöld koma heim við frásögn Svarfdælu".
Mbl. 9. febr. 1941.
5 See for example Eldjám, Kristján, 1962 and interview with Eldjám in Tímarit Máls og Menningar 1966.
6 See for example Hermans-Auðardóttir, Margrét, 1989, Einarsson, Bjami F., 1989 og Friðriksson, Adolf,
1994.
106