Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 63

LANDSCAPES OF BURIAL: CONTRASTING THE PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN
PARADIGMS OF BURIAL IN VIKING AGE AND MEDIEVAL ICELAND
there are simply too many burials which
cannot be squeezed into either category,
pagan or Christian, for it to be possible to
discard this idea altogether. Further
investigation into such sites is planned as
part of our project and will hopefully
throw clearer light on this.
Before we move on to discuss the
implications of these fmdings it remains to
note that although the existence of a
Christian cemetery can as a rule be
surmised from the existence of a chapel or
a church, there is growing evidence that
burial ceased at many chapels and annex
churches as early as the 12th century,
often long before the church or chapel
itself fell into disuse. At Hofstaðir in
Mývatnssveit the use of the cemetery
predates the 1300 tephra (Gestsdóttir &
Isaksen 2010) while there is documentary
evidence that the church was still there in
1477 (Diplomatarium islandicum VI,
110). Similarly in Neðri Ás in
Skagafjörður the bulk of nearly 90 burials
predate the 1104 tephra while only a
couple clearly post-date it. The church
itslef was however clearly in use until the
late 13th century (Vésteinsson 2000b). An
ongoing project investigating churches in
Skagafjörður has found comparable
pattems in the dates of burials at six other
sites in that region (Zoéga & Sigurðarson
2010) and the small number of graves
reported from some church sites known to
have been in use for centuries (e.g.
Þorkelsson 2007, 35) is also consistent
with these observations. It is unclear how
universal this discontinuation of burial at
lesser churches was - there is evidence for
burial at chapels as late as the 16th century
(Friðriksson & Vésteinsson 1992, 56) -
but there was obviously a significant
reduction in the number of cemeteries in
operation a century or more after the
initial cull associated with the conversion.
Implications
Our objective here has been to quantify
the change in cemetery distribution
associated with the conversion to
Christianity in late lOth and early llth
century Iceland. We have found that there
are good grounds to believe that there was
a cemetery associated with every farm in
pagan times, while this ratio was reduced
by as much as half in early Christian
times. It was overwhelmingly the smallest
farms which lost their own cemeteries and
had, presumably, to bury their dead in
cemeteries of neighbouring farms. There
are a number of unsolved problems
surrounding this matter. For instance it is
entirely unclear how farms with multiple
households arranged their burials in pagan
times, i.e. whether the pagan cemeteries
relate to specific households only or
whether they served all who lived on the
same property, irrespective of household
divisions. Here the uncertainty is as much
about the existence and prevalence of
multiple household farms in the Viking
age as about the distribution of cemeteries.
Another problem, already alluded to, is
about the details of the transition and the
possibility that there were intermediate
stages or types of burial grounds. Such
questions we hope to throw light on in our
project, but the general developments
described here speak for themselves and
can support observations to guide future
research.
Firstly there is clearly a long-term
trend towards fewer, and therefore more
communal, cemeteries. It is important to
note that it cannot be taken for granted that
all the pagan cemeteries were in use right
up to the end of the pagan period; it is not
certain that their disuse was associated
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