Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Page 35

ON FARM MOUNDS
as the order of magnitude is likely to have
been not much more than a step up here
or a step down there. Many later farms
were built on an incline and at Laufás the
íloors of the buildings at the end of the
long central corridor were 1,5 m higher
than the front door, and each of the rooms
branching off from the corridor are 0,3-
0,5 m higher relative to its floor. Such
differences may therefore create no seri-
ous problems for day to day living but
they can have significant consequences
for the build-up of farm-mounds. In par-
ticular it is easy to see that when a room
is rebuilt which has a lower floor level
than adjoining rooms there will be no rea-
son to maintain that level but a good rea-
son to fíll it in, with the unusable turf
from the walls being replaced. Thus the
multi-celled layout of late and post-
Viking age farmhouses will have exacer-
bated the effect of floor build-up
explained above: not only may floors in
those parts of the farmhouse with most
activity have increased more in thickness,
than if the house was a single celled
structure, but the effects of that increase
will have been exponentially greater. A
10 cm thick floor will not only have
resulted in 10 cm of the surrounding
walls being left in at rebuilding but also a
1-10 cm fíll on top of lower floors in
other rooms as well as 10 cm of the walls
of those structures. This means that while
a single celled house of the dimensions
20x5 m with a 10 cm thick floor leaves 20
m3 of floor and wall material on site at
rebuilding, a same sized hall with a 3x3
m annex will leave as much as 27 m3,
nearly four times as much on account of
the annexe as the larger room (Fig. 14).
Add to this that wall volumes seem to be
signifícantly greater in multi-celled farm-
houses, with wall area to floor area ratios
of 3:1 at Sandártunga (from 1693) and
2:1 at Gröf (from 1362) compared to 1:1
or less in single celled Viking age halls
like Isleifsstaðir and Aðalstræti. Those
greater volumes will also have con-
tributed to the build up of farm-mounds.
An accelerating process
There are grounds to believe that the
process of farm-mound accumulation
was slow at fírst but accelerated with
time and increased volume. This is partly
1 1 1 l l . 1 1 1 1 1 fill / \ l 1 1 1 1 1
wall floor wall 0 1 2 meters floor wall
14. Schematic cross-section of an Icelandic turf house showing how a multi-cellular layout
exacerbates accumulation of floor and wall materials. Drawing by Stefán Olafsson
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