Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 93

FARMSTEAD RELOCATION AT THE END OF THE VIKING AGE.
RESULTS OF THE SKAGAFJÖRÐUR ARCHAEOLOGICAL SETTLEMENT SURVEY
not fit the pattem evident in the size,
establishment order, and spacing of other
farms in the survey area. One way or
another, the entwined history of the sites
illustrates the potential range of
interactions among farms, farmsteads, and
households in the Viking Age.
Post-occupational use, memory
and forgetting
What happened to these farmsteads after
they were abandoned as the primary
domestic core of the farm? This is a
particularly salient question in Langholt
where the original farmsteads were
buried and slowly erased from the
landscape and social memory. Unlike
other Viking Age features, real and
imagined, after a period of time there
were no salient features associated with
these spots to anchor or attach memory
(cf. Friðriksson 1994) and these sites
were not recorded in historical records,
place names, or known to local residents.
Like many other abandoned and
relocated fanusteads in Iceland, the Viking
Age sites at both Lower Stóra-Seyla and
Lower Glaumbær continued to be used
after they were abandoned as the primary
domestic sites on the farm. Stóra-Seyla
had an llth century paddock and a
post-1300 byre built on, and to some
degree into, the older buildings. Later,
probably in the early modem period, a
large hole was dug into the ruins and filled
with farm trash. At Glaumbær, the mins of
the longhouse were filled with a mixture of
turf, ash, charcoal, and a concentration of
slag in the southem part of the building.
All of these deposits pre-date the 1104
tephra. At least one bam was situated near
the farmstead during the medieval period
and continued in use into the 20th century.
The continued use of sites as smithies,
corrals, barns, and rubbish pits,
demonstrates the attraction of these places
after their abandonment as domestic sites.
It is likely that the later occupants, at least
in the first century or two after relocation,
were aware of the old farmsteads.
At some point, both sites were
forgotten. When did these initial
settlements disappear from memory?
Interestingly, although the medieval
fannsteads at Stóra-Seyla and Glaumbær
are mentioned in the historical sagas, the
relocation of either farm is not mentioned.
The elision is not terribly surprising as the
accounts are minimal and do not describe
the farms in any detail. But it also may
suggest that farmstead relocation was not
inherently noteworthy. In the epilogue of
the Saga of the Greenlanders, it is said
that Snorri, Þorfinnr and Guðríðr’s son
born in the North American colony, had
a church built for his mother after she
returned from a pilgrimage to Rome, a
significant alteration to the site. Whether
or not the account in the Saga of the
Greenlanders is true, later chroniclers
were interested in tying the site to the line
of bishops descended from Guðríðr but
they make no mention of the relocation
(Þorláksson 2001).
The question remains as to whether or
not medieval chroniclers knew about these
relocations, regardless of how peripheral
they were to their narratives, and when
these sites faded from memory. Certainly,
the Viking Age farmsteads would have
been visible on the surface for some time,
and surely held in the memory of
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