Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 71

THE ICELANDIC WHETSTONE MATERIAL - AN OVERVIEW OF RECENT RESEARCH
was almost exclusively exported aí'ter the
factories took over the market in the late
19th century (Livland, 1992, 37-49). The
softer stone was preferred locally in
Norway and was believed to give a better
edge (Livland, 1992, 67). The softer stone
type is most often seen in Viking Age and
medieval collections in Iceland, but both
types are present. This type had to be
retrieved by hand and the geological ores
for this type remained in the possession of
the local farmers. On the other hand, the
hardstone could be retrieved by using
dynamite, which suited the factory mass
production better.
Nearly all collections analyzed in
Iceland show a predominance of the
Eidsborg schist type, with the exception of
Herjolfsdalur in the Westman Islands and
Hrísbrú in the Mosfell Valley, both early
settlement sites. All examined whetstone
collections from post-medieval sites
consisted of 80% or more of this stone
type. The Eidsborg whetstone production
was stopped around 1950 by the Norrona
factory due to the increasingly hard
competition from the new carborundum
whetstones and the grinding machines
which had taken over the market.
Dark grey schist
Second to the Eidsborg schist type, the
most commonly found whetstone type in
Iceland belongs to the dark grey schist
group. In the pre-medieval period it often
makes up at least 20% of the collections,
but seems to almost disappear in the
post-medieval contexts. Individual
examples of this type have been recorded
in later contexts, but the only real
exception recorded is from the episcopal
see at Skálholt where 14 whetstones or
whetstone fragments (4.3%) from the
post-medieval collection were made of
dark grey schist. This group consists of
very finely grained, dark grey mica schist
types, which in the Icelandic collections
can be found with a purplish, green or blue
tint but most commonly as dark grey with
a silvery tint.
It has not been possible to accurately
provenance date this group of dark grey
whetstones, which can be found
geologically in a large belt crossing
Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland and areas
in central Europe (Mitchell & al. 1984). It
has been suggested that the most probable
origin is located within the
central-southem Caledonides of Norway
(Crosby et al.1987, 502). Resi notes in her
study of the whetstones from Kaupang,
that the variation within this type indicates
that raw material might not derive from a
single site, but could have been extracted
from several different sites and distributed
through a less centralized trade system
(Resi, 2008, 24-25). Clearly more
research into this field is required to fully
understand this category of schist
whetstones within a broader Scandinavian
and North Atlantic context.
Together with the light grey Eidsborg
schist, this group of dark grey whetstones
was predominant in the westem and
northem part of the Viking world. They
seem to have been working together as
some sort of set, with the finely grained
but slightly coarser Eidsborg stone used
first and the very fine-grained dark grey
stone for fmishing the edges. The studies
so far reveal a drastic decrease in the
distribution of this dark grey type during
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