Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2005, Page 55

COMMERCIAL AND SUBSISTANCE FlSHING IN VESTFIRÐIR
Magnússon came to Iceland with orders
from the Danish king to conduct and
supervise the writing of a land registry.
He and another Icelander Páll Vídalín
were to collect information on every
farm in Iceland including, amongst other
things, a population count. The motive
behind this census and land registry was
to acquire information for tax purposes.
At the end of 1703 the entire population
had been counted; however, it took sev-
eral years to finish the land registry,
which was not completed until 1712
(Magnússon 1940).
The land registry of Árni
Magnússon and Páll Vídalín is probably
the only document that can be used to
create a clear picture of farm economy in
Iceland at earlier periods. The reason for
this is that the registry includes raw data,
i.e. total number of domestic animals,
farm value and other economic values for
every farm in Iceland, making it possible
to analyze the data with statistical meth-
ods. The advantage that the land registry
data has over other sources is that it is
less likely to have been influenced by the
writer and the persons that submitted the
data, i.e. the farmers. Still it should be
kept in mind that farmers more than like-
ly did not always tell the entire story;
especially when it came to describing the
productiveness of their farms and access
to other resources. In spite of this, there is
no reason to doubt the correctness of the
numerical values for the total number of
domestic animals.
Statistical analysis of the farms
in the northem region of Vestfirðir has
shown that only 20-30% of the farm
value was based on agriculture, between
15-20% from resources such as stranding
and driftwood, but the remaining 50-60%
is not accounted for. Statistical analysis
for agricultural regions has shown that
between 60-80% of farm value came
from agriculture. The land registry does
not give any concrete information about
físhing, except for stating if a farm had
access to the sea or if a físhing station
was based on the farmland. Still, it does
not give any numerical values that can be
tested with statistical methods (Edvards-
son 2002c).
The remaining 50-60% proba-
bly came from fishing and archaeological
research actually corroborates this.
However, more data is needed to fully
understand the role of físhing for the
Viking and Medieval periods.
Archaeology of the Fishing and
Farming Economy
For the past 10 years excavations on var-
ious sites across Iceland have produced a
large number of faunal remains. These
remains have been analyzed at the zooar-
chaeology laboratory at Hunter College,
CUNY, New York,. The assemblages
have been shown to include both mam-
mal and fish bones and all sites, whether
costal or inland, have produced saltwater
species, mainly cod and haddock. The
role of fish in the Icelandic economy has
always been viewed as a subsistence
product and that it never really played an
important part of the economy except for
a brief period in the 13th-15th centuries.
The archaeological evidence has begun
contradicting this seemingly passive role
of fish products in the Icelandic econo-
my. The archaeological data shows that
fish bones, especially cod, increase on
Icelandic sites from the settlement to the
present day. This clearly demonstrates
that físh products became an important
aspect of the Icelandic farm economy
early in its history. The archaeological
53