Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2009, Page 9

Gavin Lucas
EDITORIAL
In the seventh volume of Archaeologia
Islandica, we present another diverse set
of papers from both young and estab-
lished scholars. The issue begins with
two papers taking a fresh look at Viking
burials in Iceland, but from different
angles. Friðriksson’s paper looks at the
nature of burial sites in terms of the num-
bers of graves and their spatial organiza-
tion; he convincingly argues that the
dominant notion of a single grave site is
based largely on the vagaries of recovery
conditions and cannot be used as a useful
guide to understanding early burial prac-
tices. Drawing on more recent fieldwork,
multiple interments may have been much
more common than assumed, if not the
norm. Taking the evidence of multiple
grave sites further, Fridriksson also
examines the layout of the graves and
fínds a recurring pattern of linear arrange-
ment. What the paper shows most of all
is how much more work is needed, and in
particular, new approaches to excavating
such sites which take a broader view of
the whole area around graves, rather than
a narrow focus on the grave itself and its
contents.
Pétursdóttir approaches the subject
from another but equally compelling per-
spective; in her critical examination of
the history of research into Viking burials
in Iceland, she argues against an oft-held
assumption that the Icelandic corpus of
pagan burials offers only limited poteni-
tal for analysis because of the poverty of
grave goods, in contrast to other regions
of Viking settlement. Adopting an explic-
itly theoretical perspective inspired by a
new discourse of ‘symmetrical archaeol-
ogy’, Þóra Pétursdóttir suggests that the
real problem facing such studies lies not
with its dataset but its theoretical assump-
tions. This is a refreshing critique as well
as suggesting possible altemative ave-
nues of research which focus on issues
such as social memory and biography,
both of which have been important topics
in archaeology over the past decade.
More object-focused studies comprise
the remainder of the issue; the third arti-
cle discusses a successful pilot study to
source obsidian (a volcanic glass), which
occurs naturally in many locations
throughout Iceland and has been utilized
by people here since the settlement peri-
od right up to modem tirnes. Geochemical
analysis by Richard Hughes of obsidian
flakes recovered from excavations at the
Viking settlement of Hofstaðir in
Mývatnssveit revealed their source to be
the nearby Krafla system and more
broadly suggests the potential of further
research. One of the advantages of such
analysis is that it is non-destructive,
which many chemical analyses of arte-
facts are not. The fourth study also looks
at human utilization of a natural material,
in this instance, walrus ivory; Elizabeth
Pierce summarizes the finds of walrus
ivory from archaeological contexts in
Iceland and argues for a small but sig-
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