Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 94

DOUGLAS J. BOLENDER, JOHN M. STEINBERG AND BRIAN N. DAMIATA
subsequent generations at the farms.
Today, the Viking Age site at Lower
Glaumbær, located in a flattened field is
not visible as anything other than a very
slight, shapeless, rise in the modern
homefield. The unobtrusiveness of the site
is not a product of modem field flattening.
When the Hekla 1104 tephra fell, only a
short time after abandonment of the site,
the buildings had collapsed into a broad
mound in which only a gentle rise and fall
of the walls and the variegated surface of
collapsed turf inside the structure were still
apparent. By the time of the Hekla 1300
ash fall the site was nearly flat with only a
small area of shallow dips outside the
former entrance in the northeast comer of
the longhouse. At this time the site was
largely unmarked in the landscape and
would have been known only by memory
and not any visible index.
Like Lower Glaumbær, there was no
contemporary knowledge of the Viking
Age farmstead at Lower Stóra-Seyla. The
name Langhús (lit. “long house”) does
appear in its place name inventory
(Ingvarsson 1999), however it is
associated with a spot south of the
medieval farmstead, away from the Viking
Age site, and clearly is not associated with
the buried farmstead. The Viking Age site
is not marked on the surface and appears as
a low series of ridges that show little of the
structure undemeath and can easily be
mistaken for the product of solifluction or
soil creep associated with the hillside
immediately to the west. For the most part
the basic smooth surface of the site was in
place by the time of the Hekla 1104 layer.
However, there is a distinct dismption in
the Hekla 1104 tephra associated with the
youngest building on the site. There the
tephra layer is mixed in with the upper
layers of turf debris suggesting that the
building was still in the process of
collapsing when the ash layer fell. The
erasure of the early buildings on the site
was probably accomplished by the later
inhabitants of the farmstead. They appear
to have deliberately infilled and smoothed
out old buildings, probably to make the
space easier to navigate. Other than the last
buildings in use, there was little to see
there at the time of relocation. Like the
Viking Age site at Lower Glaumbær, by
1300 Lower Stóra-Seyla looked much the
same as it does today. The most salient
feature on the contemporary site, a
post-1300 bam, was built on a relatively
smooth surface that overlay multiple
sfructures fforn the Viking Age. The bam
and a nearby large fire pit were dug
directly into the mins of the old farmhouse
and it is difficult to imagine that their
builders were unaware that these new
structures were situated within older mins,
although whether or not they understood
them to be domestic buildings is difficult
to ascertain.
Discussion
Some qualifications are in order to begin to
understand the prevalence and possible
importance of farm relocation. The SASS
project concentrated on geophysical
surveying and excavation at the Viking
Age fannsteads. Furthermore, because the
Viking Age component of the
farm-mounds is deeply buried and often
covered with contemporary farm
buildings, roads, and inffastmcture, we
were not able to detail the earliest phases
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