Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2010, Page 36

ORRI VÉSTEINSSON
explicable by the mechanisms described
above: with few cells each rebuilding
would leave relatively little old material
in the ground but as the number of cells
grew the build-up would become more
rapid, with greater volumes of material
left from each phase. Once the build-up
was under way and living on that spot
had become a matter of tradition continu-
ing to do so will also have become cultur-
ally and emotionally meaningful
(Bertelsen & Lamb 1993, 547; Aldred
2010, 106).
Other effects of living on the same
spot for centuries may also have begun to
tell: the build-up of turf-debris from
knocked down walls as well as of mid-
dens will have been made easier by the
gradual rising of the mound, creating
sides (as well as greater likelihood of
depressions that needed filling in) where
material could be dumped without creat-
ing problems but adding considerably to
the overall volume of the mound.
In 1791 Guðlaugur Sveinsson berated
his countrymen:
All over many sluggards display a great lack of
tidiness, in that when they dismantle old houses
they only push the turf-debris outside the walls, or
into the gaps between rooms, and do not then
transport it away. This I think is the main reason
that in many places farmhouses are so sunken, that
little or no part of them is above the ground apart
from the roofs ... for this these [poor wretches]
claim there are benefits, namely: 1) the ease of not
having to transport the turf away, 2) that the old turf
creates shelter for the houses, and 3) that when the
walls are overgrown and the house needs rebuilding
again it only becomes necessary to reconstruct the
walls on the inside ...
(Guðlaugur Sveinsson 1791, 246)
From this it appears as if farm sites were
literally drowning in old turf-debris and
this is certainly indicated by low-status
sites like Foma-Lá and Sandártunga (Fig.
15) where the rooms are very small but
the walls very thick, so thick that their
cores, made up presumably of old turf,
15. Plans of Aðalstræti, a lOth century farm to the left, and Sandártunga, abandoned in 1693 to
the right, illustrating the differences in wall thickness.
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