Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Side 34

Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Side 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 32 Á
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Archaeologia Islandica

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