Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 45

A NOTE ON THE REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF PAGAN BURIALS IN ICELAND
Figure 2. Burial sites (find locations) as a percentage of the number of tax-paying farmers by
quarter in c. 1100 and 1311.
were exempt from paying the tax and it is
conceivable that this proportion differed
ffom one quarter to the next.
Although the 1311 figures seem to be
based on an actual count, with 264
farmers in one region and 268 in another,
the rest of the numbers are given in
rounded tens and, more worryingly, there
is a mismatch between the totals given for
the quarters and the sums of the numbers
given for the regions within each quarter.1
The mismatch is small enough that it does
not affect the overall credibility of the
1311 figures, which are also in broad
agreement with both the 1100 and 1690s
numbers, but it serves as a waming that
their accuracy cannot be relied on. Like
the 1100 figures the ones from 1311 only
include those farmers who paid tax,
leaving out an uknonwn number of
households which did not. Comparison
with data from around 1700 suggests that
the 1100 and 1311 figures represent
lögbýli, assessed farm units, rather than
households, which in 1703 were nearly
two to each fann.
These figures are therefore primarily
useful as a guide to the relative population
levels between quarters and regions. As
these must ultimately relate to the
productive capacity of the land (and sea) it
is reasonable to assume that the same
proportions applied in the Viking age.
Looking first at the proportion of
pagan burial sites (N=170, see Friðriksson
& Vésteinsson this volume) to the later
population proxies, a well known pattern
emerges. Against both the c. 1100 and
1311 data, the highest proportion of burial
sites is in the North and the lowest in the
West although the difference is greater in
1311 (three times as many sites in the
North than West in c. 1100 as opposed to
four times in 1311). The other main
1 Bjöm M. Olsen (1907-15, 303-307) tried to argue the mismatch away by suggesting that the largest discrepancy, that of
tax-paying farmers in the south, was due to a failure of a scribe to translate the arabic numeral 500 correctly to long
hundreds, but even if this was right it would not explain the smaller inconsistencies in the figures for the northem and
westem quarters.
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