Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2013, Page 59

PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES WHEN USING BEETLE REMAINS (COLEOPTERA) FOR INTERPRETATION OF
POST-MEDIEVAL SETTLEMENTS IN THE INTERDISCIPLINARY HÓLAR PROJECT, ICELAND
Figure 2
present time down to the 18th century.
During the excavation, soil was sampled
in a variety of different ways depending on
the specific situation for various analyses,
such as for insects. As mentioned above, it
is clear that in most studies up to the
present day, the dominating sampling
environment is of house floors of different
origin. Therefore much effort was put in to
sampling floor deposits using different
strategies to obtain a sufficient amount of
material that would produce useful results.
The sediment at the excavated site at Hólar
was generally silt clay or clayey silt with a
high organic content. This sediment type
is the same as encountered at other sites
studied in Iceland for insect remains by the
author (Fig. 1), but the actual clay content
has not been analysed in any previous
samples. In sediment samples from
Bessastadir, where extant floor material
from a Viking Age long house was
studied, the LOI (loss-on-ignition) was
measured through standard methods
discussed by several uthors (e.g.
Bengtsson and Enell, 1986; Heiri et. al.,
2001; Santisteban et. al., 2004). The
organic content was very high, but even
though this may be an effect of high clay
content it does not explain all the high
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