Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 34

TRBOJEVIÓ N., MOONEY D. E. AND BELL A. J.
45 m2 and an interior volume of 133 m3.
This is a replica of the smallest Viking
Age hall identified so far in Iceland and the
only reconstructed Viking house in Iceland
to have been built using only traditional
methods and materials. The replica at
Eiriksstaðir is very much a ‘hands-on’
exhibit, which also hosts re-enactment
events, where visitors can handle objects
and experience what life was like in
Viking Age Iceland. Therefore, it provides
the perfect location for carrying out
ethno-archaeological experiments that
could illustrate aspects of the reality of
living inside structures of this kind.
The experiment
Assumptions were made during the design
of the experiment, which took place
between ffom 7 to 9 June 2010. The most
obvious of these was that wood was the
primary fuel at Viking Age farmsteads.
Archaeological research has shown that
this was not the case, and that in fact a
wide variety of fuels were used at early
Icelandic farms. Some like Vatnsfjörður in
the north-west of the country, did use local
birch wood as the primary fuel both for
domestic and industrial purposes (Mooney
2009). A mixture of wood, turf, animal
dung and peat was used for domestic fuel
at the farms of Hofstaðir and Sveigakot in
Mývatnssveit (Vésteinsson & Simpson
2004), and a similar variety of fuels was
used at Aðalstræti in Reykjavík (Milek
2007). At the other end of the spectrum,
the 10-12th century hearth at Reykholt in
Borgarfjörður contained no wood charcoal
at all; instead peat and dung were used as
fuel at the site (Sveinbjamardóttir 2004).
For the purpose of this project, however,
the native wood, birch (Betula pubescens)
was the sole fuel used. While this may or
may not present an accurate picture of
wood use at the time, what it does have the
potential to produce is a ‘worst case
scenario’.
The experiment involving buming
wood inside the reconstmcted house was
deliberately set in the summer season
because this is presumably the period with
the lowest consumption of firewood for
daily household needs for interior heating.
It should therefore give an indication of
the minimum quantity of wood that is
likely to have been bumed on a daily basis
inside these houses, in cases where the
inhabitants relied solely on wood. After
completion of the experiment, the results
could be correlated with available data on
the average biomass values of modem
Icelandic woodlands. This would allow us
to determine a rough estimate of the
maximum possible extent of woodlands
that would have been felled during the
summer season in order to meet the basic
household daily needs of an early
Icelandic farmstead of the size of
Eiríksstaðir. Also, by integrating the
findings of this experiment with those
planned for other periods of the year, and
by integrating size-ratio comparisons for
halls at other Viking Age sites, we would
be able to take an important step towards
determining the maximum possible extent
of woodland clearance needed to provide
sufficient fuel for a full year. This is one of
the values that is crucial in accounting for
the deforestation which took place during
the Settlement period. Finally, we would
be able to evaluate whether the drastically
reduced woodlands of post-Settlement
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