Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 59

LANDSCAPES OF BURIAL: CONTRASTING THE PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN
PARADIGMS OF BURIAL IN VIKING AGE AND MEDIEVAL ICELAND
Figure 2. Distribution of chapels and churches according to the value categories of the farms they
are associated with, compared to the same distribution of pagan burials.
problematic identification and of
unknown or uncertain valuation are
omitted 1269 church and chapel sites
remain which can be assigned to value
categories. Their distribution is shown in
Figure 2.
While churches or chapels are found
in a comparable proportion to pagan
burials at farms of middle to medium large
size, they are significantly fewer at the
very smallest farms and significantly more
numerous at the largest farms. Figure 3,
which compares the proportion of pagan
cemeteries on the one hand and churches
and chapels on the other to the number of
farms in each value category, brings this
out more clearly. Pagan cemeteries are
found at between 3 and 6% of farms in
each category while churches and chapels
show a distinct trend towards a much
closer association with higher valued
farms. In reality this trend is probably less
linear as the churches and chapels
associated with the highest valued farms
are also the best represented in the source
material. In reality there were probably
very few farms valued above 30 hundreds
or so which did not have a chapel or a
church. Looking at the 1-12 hundred
category it is apparent that these farms fall
largely in two categories: They are either
the large farms in areas of generally low
valuation (primarily coastal regions in the
East and Northwest), indicating that the
association reflects relative status rather
then the absolute productive capacity of a
farm, or they are farms which are isolated
or marginally located where chapels were
maintained to counteract difficulties in
communications and possibly as a service
to travellers (the few unambiguous cases
of roadside chapels are however not
included in these figures).
It seems therefore that whereas all or
most farms had their own cemeteries in
pagan times, in Christian times their
numbers were drastically reduced with the
smallest farms most likely to close theirs
57