Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 9

GAVIN LUCAS
EDITORIAL
This volume offers up a diverse set of
papers outlining recent research within
Icelandic archaeology. The issue begins
with a paper addressing what has been a
greatly neglected field: underwater
archaeology. Being an island, Iceland has
been dependent on the sea in multiple
ways, especially for fishing and contact
with other parts of northwestem Europe.
The importance of including the sea as a
part of cultural heritage is therefore vital
and yet at the same time, largely
under-researched and managed.
Edvardsson‘s article is thus an important
addition to the limited literature on
underwater archaeology in Iceland and one
which, one hopes will mark the beginning
of a more systematic engagement with this
neglected part of the archaeological
record. The paper that follows, by Nikola
Trbojevic, Dawn Mooney and Aidan Bell
addresses the rate of wood consumption
for domestic íuel in Viking age Iceland;
this has important consequences, not least
in relation to the process of deforestation
and woodland management. Their
experimental approach offers a new set of
data to incorporate into these larger
questions and is a vast improvement over
‘guestimates’ based on imagined
consumption rates. Indeed, with its strong
tradition of using historical and
ethno-historical/folkore sources to help
interpret the archaeological record,
Icelandic archaeology can only benefit
ffom an injection of altemative analogies,
and experimental archaeology (which has
been used to address other issues in
Icelandic archaeology like iron working
and formation processes) is a fíeld - like
underwater archaeology - ripe with
under-utilized potential.
The next two set of papers by Orri
Vésteinsson and Adolf Friðriksson outline
preliminary thoughts on the location of
burials in Iceland, especially focusing on
the continuities and contrasts between
pagan and Christian burial grounds. Their
work is part of a new project exploring
burial practices in Iceland over the long
term - that is, the 1100 years of human
settlement in the country. Established
explicitly to counter the conventional
tendency to separate the study of pagan
and Christian burial, their study tries to
deal with the burial record as a totality, and
in so doing, potentially uncover blind spots
and reveal new pattems in how people
treated their dead over the long term. Their
papers are followed by a study of one of
the most common and persistent artefact
types found in Iceland: the whetstone.
Occuring on sites ffom between the ninth
to nineteenth centuries, these small
eveiyday objects have not been the subject
of much attention, perhaps because of their