Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 50

ORRI VÉSTEINSSON
significantly larger than in other parts of
the country. In Berufjörður in the West a
cluster of four cemeteries with 4-8 graves
each ups the total figure of graves for the
West considerably, making the West look
slightly less anomalous than when only
burial sites are considered. At present
however only a handful of pagan
cemeteries have been fully excavated so
most figures of grave numbers are likely to
be underestimated (Friðriksson 2009). At
present it is therefore not possible to argue
that there were regional differences in the
sizes of cemeteries. That, however, is an
issue which ongoing and future research is
set to throw light on. More circumstantial,
but no less intriguing, is the fact that the
ratio of Christian cemeteries to settlements
is significantly lower in the West than in
other parts of the country (Friðriksson &
Vésteinsson this volume). If there were
already fewer cemeteries per settlement in
the West before the conversion that might
explain this pattem in Christian times.
It is also possible that there were
regional differences in burial forms which
affect the distribution. Cremations have
been suggested as their absence ffom the
Icelandic burial record is somewhat
perplexing given the frequency of this rite
in Scandinavia in the Viking age. If
cremations were widespread they should
however have been detected (a single
unsubstantiated case has been reported -
Byock et al. 2005) unless they were less
likely than inhumations to have included
grave-goods, another proposition that
would be difficult to sustain. Water burials
are a more likely candidate. If they were,
for some reason, more common in the
West than in other parts of the country that
would explain the difference. This would
however be exceedingly difficult to
demonstrate, and the lack of fmds of
human bones and artefacts ffom lakes,
rivers and bogs speaks against it.
A final possibility is that there were
regional differences not in burial
frequency but in the prevalence of grave
goods. If grave goods were placed in
graves much more rarely or in much
smaller quantity in the West than other
parts of the country this would clearly have
affected the archaeological visibility of
pagan burials there because the vast
majority of such burials are identified as
such on the basis of the presence of grave
goods. It is well known that pagan burials
can have no grave goods whatsoever but
the ffequency of burials with grave-goods
relative to those without is unknown as
pagan burials without grave-goods have
primarily been identified in the very few
cases where controlled excavations of
whole cemeteries have been carried out.
Isolated finds of burials without
gravegoods are as a mle not included in
Eldjám’s catalogue (although Tyrðilmýri
in the West is one exception, Eldjám 2000,
120) although he publishes a number of
them as possibles alongside the main
assemblage. The distribution of these
burials largely follows that of the more
securely identified pagan burials and there
are certainly not significant numbers of
them in the West. Systematic recording of
such finds is however only now underway,
as a part of the project Death and burial in
Iceland, and may give grounds for
examining this explanation more closely.
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