Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Side 18

OSCAR ALDRED
tury (Andrews 1975; Withers 2000). The
Icelanders were already intuitively con-
nected to their local landscapes from oral
and historical traditions, which may have
meant that representations of the land-
scape which they knew and was familiar
to them did not need to be depicted on
maps. A cursory glance of these maps
shows that the decision making choices
of what was included and omitted would
have resided in perception of landscape
and perhaps the purpose of the maps.
This is also demonstrated in successive
mapping where the American based
maps misnamed many places as well as
anglicising the words for non-Icelanders
to be able to read the maps effectively.
Much local knowledge was omitted dur-
ing the map making process, and this can
be seen when the place name records are
compared against these maps, though
more militarily important information
such as tracks were mapped without nec-
essarily knowing if they were animal or
human made routes. The decision mak-
ing process was perhaps more concerned
with the state than local knowledge, or
for foreigners rather than Icelanders and
illustrates an outsiders’ perception of the
landscape, not one of people intuitively
connected to it.
Modern practice
Archaeological practices from 1939 in
Iceland were marked by increased inter-
disciplinary approaches. Whilst archae-
ology from the early twentieth century
extensively used historical sources, the
late 1930s and early 1940s saw a new
companion for the discipline in the earth
sciences. Fortida gardar i Island was a
publication of archaeological research
conducted in 1939 by a large research
team from Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and
Finland (Stenberger 1943). Þjórsárdalur
became the focus for an advanced study
of the archaeology, with specific land-
scape orientated research objectives to
date the abandonment of the valley. Sig-
urður Þorarinsson introduces the volume
by describing the natural environment and
sets the geographic scene for the archaeo-
logical work. Integral to the excavations
were the recording of tephras, which Sig-
urður Þorarinsson sequenced at all eleven
excavation sites. He used the identifica-
tion of the tephras at each site to map the
distribution of the tephra fall-outs, and on
this he placed these sites with topographic
features. From the sequencing he was able
to determine the date of abandonment in
the valley, the origins of the tephra and
to project the extent of the fall out across
Iceland. The results of the tephra analy-
sis allowed a comprehensive study of the
settlement change and development to be
carried out at a landscape scale and in
doing so paved the way for modern Ice-
landic archaeological practice.
Sigurður Þorarinsson also car-
ried out a similar but smaller study of
settlement in many parts of Iceland,
for example in 1974 in Vopnafjörður
and Jökuldalur in northeast of Iceland
(Sigurður Þorarinsson 1976). Here he
assessed the valleys based on their docu-
mentary sources, followed with localised
test pitting to establish when the settle-
ment receded from the interior areas up
the valleys, which had already by 1703
retracted considerably. He suggests that
the retreat started in the 1 lth century but
in some places took place as earlier as the
late tenth century. Like the Þjórsárdalur
study this is good landscape study and
had much in common with geography
(specifically historical geography) by
showing the development of landscape
16