Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2005, Page 84

Garðar Guðmundsson, Gavin Lucas, Hildur Gestsdóttir and Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir
0 10m
I i ■ L I ■ — I I
Figure 1. Location of test pits around church.
Material from all excavated burials was
retrieved which included human bone
and coffins, as well as the very few arti-
facts from the surrounding grave earth.
Coffins were either removed whole in the
case of infant burials or dismantled in the
grave and numbered for reassembly; they
were also cleaned on site and shipped
back to Reykjavík for further study,
along with human bones and finds. The
burials discussed below are numbered
according to the Test Pit with sub-
number suffixes (e.g. Burial 7.1, 7.2,
etc.).
The Burials
There were no burials disturbed in the
northem test pits except in TP3, where
the remains of a coffin and human bones
were retrieved; otherwise, the southem
edge of grave cuts just extended into the
test pits (TPl-4). Fragments from the
coffin in TP3 (3.1) and human bones
were recovered during machining but no
further information on the position of the
coffin or body is available. In contrast,
the southem and westem holes almost all
contained graves well inside the opened
area, with two to three rows in each hole
and often with some vertical stratigraphy
as well. Generally, the burials were much
better preserved further east and became
progressively worse further west.
The analysis carried out on the
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