Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2013, Page 27

BUILDING AND KEEPING HOUSE IN 19TH-CENTURY ICELAND.
DOMESTIC IMPROVEMENTS AT HORNBREKKA, SKAGAFJÖRÐUR
Fig 9 Heart shaped clasp from the midden at Hornbrekka
‘improved’ material conditions. The
wooden floors may not have been cleaned,
the glass windows may have been left
broken and the ceramics may not have
been in matching sets but these changes
were an important aspect of people’s
engagement with cultural changes and
importantly provide an alternative,
comparative and sometimes contradictory
narrative to the one that can be gleaned
from documentary evidence alone.
Conclusion
The archaeological excavation at
Hornbrekka revealed a wealth of
information about life at the farm during
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In
this paper we have discussed some of the
interpretive trends that can be discemed
through working through and analysing
this assemblage. These trends portray a
picture of households engaged in a variety
of activities, some of which were very
specific to their localized farm and their
particular households, such as the shoring
up of a slumping wall, while others
indicate wider changes in Icelandic
society such as the purchasing of new
types of material culture, crockery and
window glass. Both sets of activities,
however, tell us how people, ‘on the
ground’ engaged and interacted with
changing conditions and serve to
complicate as well as to compliment
broader stroked narratives of global and
national developments. People experience
their world through everyday activities
and those are the venues of coping with
and instigating change. Many of these
activities are well preserved in the rich
archaeological record which needs to be
explored alongside the much better
studied textual archive. We argue that
building and keeping house were
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