Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Page 15

ORRI VÉSTEINSSON
ON FARM-MOUNDS
In the North Atlantic, from Greenland to Arctic Norway, farm-mounds dominate
the cultural landscape from the late Viking age onwards. They have been the
subject of considerable debate among North Norwegian archaeologists but in this
paper Icelandic farm-mounds are placed in the foreground. Based on several large
scale excavations of farm-mounds, including most comprehensively the one of
Stóraborg, it is possible to develop hypotheses on the mechanics of farm-mound
accumulation which, it is argued, is generated by the accumulation of floor layers
resulting in the build-up of much larger volumes of turf. On this basis it is possible
to speculate what triggered this sort of accumulation in the fírst place and it is
hypothesized that this had to do with social and ideological changes in the late
Viking age.
Orri Vésteinsson, Department of Archaeology, University of Iceland, Reykjavík,
Iceland; Email: orri@hi.is
Keywords: Farm-mounds, floors, turf, North Atlantic, architecture
Farm-mounds are a distinct feature of
Norse North-Atlantic archaeology. They
are found primarily in Norway north of the
Arctic Circle, in Iceland and Greenland
but also in the Faroes (Arge 1997, 41-43;
Arge et al. 2005, 605) and possibly in the
Northem Isles of Scotland (Bertelsen &
Lamb 1993, 547-48). They have accumu-
lated in the second millennium AD where
farm buildings have been situated on the
same spot for several centuries and can be
more than 3 metres in depth.
Following early observations on farm-
mounds in the 1950s and 1960s a lively
debate began within Norwegian archaeol-
ogy in the 1970s about the nature of, and
reasons for, this archaeological phenome-
non (see overview in Urbanczyk 1992,
105-11; also for later references Mook &
Bertelsen 2007). In Norway farm-mounds
are mostly found north of the Arctic
Circle on arable land in the coastal
regions. While some of them cap very
early settlement remains it seems that as a
mle they only began to accumulate in the
Viking age or High middle ages.
Norwegian archaeologists have as a result
tried to explain what caused the apparent-
ly sudden appearance of farm-mounds in
the Norwegian arctic in the high medieval
period. No simple answer has been pro-
posed, nor does there seem to be consen-
sus as to the reasons for the emergence of
the farm-mounds, except that they must
be complex and have to do with environ-
mental and socio-economic factors.
Because of the intriguing temporal
and geographical parameters of the
ARCHAEOLOGIA ISLANDICA 8 (2010) 13-39