Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 56

ADOLF FRIÐRiKSSON AND ORRI VÉSTEINSSON
Figure 1. The distribution of pagan burials according to the value categories of the farms they
are associated witli.
clear that this does not reflect the original
associations: cemeteries are often close to
settlements long abandoned and for which
no valuation figures are available and in
many cases it is difficult to judge to which
of two farms a cemeteiy belongs when it
is situated on the boundary between them.
It is important to note ín this context that a
farm here denotes a lögbýli, a property
which as a mle has one or two main
households on the same site but can also
have other subsidiary ones, sometimes in
different locations. We approached this by
looking first at the valuations of all the
farms named in the catalogue (N=142 as
28 sites on common land or other
unassessed land cannot be used) and then
a subset of only those sites where little
reasonable doubt couldbe raised aboutthe
association (N=82). Figure 1 shows that
there is no significant differenoe in the
distribution of these two groups — a
tendency in the literaturc to associate
pagan cemetedes with tnajor farms
showing up in the larger, less reliable,
group. What is more Figure 1 shows that
there is no significant difference in the
distribution of pagan cemeteries
according to the value category of the
fann they are associated with and the
distribution of all farms into these same
categories. In other words pagan
cemeteries are found in the same
proportion of poor farms (1-12, 13-24
hundreds) as in middle sized (25-36,
37-48 hundreds) or large ones (+49
hundreds) suggesting that their
distribution reflects that of farms in
general. This suggests that pagan
cemeteries are to be expected at all farms,
irrespective of their size or value.
The Christian paradigm of
burial location
In contrast to the pagan paradigm of burial
location Christian cemeteries were as a
mle located inside the home-field
boundary. This has been observed also in
Norse Greenland (Krogh 1976) and in
19th century Iceland it can be added that
the cemeteries, invariably with a church,
were not only in the home-field but also
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