Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 114

Uggi Ævarsson
GRÖF - METHODS AND INTERPRETATIONS
The year is 1954. In autumn some farm-
ers in Öræfasveit, in the south of Iceland,
are preparing a vegetable garden with a
bulldozer. Suddenly they hit something
hard and realize it is the old stone wall of
a ruin: beneath the topsoil they have dis-
covered an old byre. They contact the
director of the National Museum, Dr.
Kristján Eldjám, who sends a man to
check it out. An excavation is carried out
the following summer and then, on and
off, each summer until 1957. In all it took
a bit less than three months to excavate
the site, with one experienced excavator
and some local men.
It is possible to consider contemporary
archaeology in Iceland as the archaeolo-
gy of the last two to three decades while
"the old archaeology" is generally from
around the tum of the 19th century -
though there may still be some who con-
sider the old archaeology as the only
archaeology. The excavation at Gröf in
the 1950’s is not a typical example of
Icelandic archaeology because it belongs
neither to the old school nor the new one.
Rather it is on the brink of huge changes
in methodological thought in Icelandic
archaeology. The aim of this article is to
analyse the methods used in an archaeo-
logical excavation in Iceland, carried out
by Icelanders in the mid-20th century.
The research objective behind the project
as well as the interpretation of the site
will be investigated in order to explore
the relationship between archaeological
method and interpretation. There are two
issues here: on the one hand there is the
distinction between interpretation and
method, on the other hand, there is the
question of the neutrality of excavation,
i.e. is there such a thing as interpretation-
free collection of data?
It goes without saying that methods
and objectives have changed a great deal
in the last fifty years in Icelandic archae-
ology. But is this change complete? Is
there a gap, a black hole, between today
and fifty years ago in archaeology; is it a
completely different discipline? And by
implication, is information, which is
roughly fifty years old, outdated and use-
less because the methods used then were
incredibly simple to the contemporary
archaeologist? When people in any peri-
od have developed a certain method,
there is a tendency to think that older
methods are just inferior. For example,
archaeologists who are raised using sin-
gle contex plarming, find methods that
are based on the Wheeler box system of
no use. Of course there is a huge differ-
ence in data collection if one is digging
by arbitrary spits, following layers or just
uncovering some old remains. It is not
the intention here to minimize these dif-
ferences but to underline the difference in
interpretation that is associated with dif-
Archaeologia Islandica 3 (2004) 112-120