Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2013, Side 82

Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2013, Side 82
GUÐRÚN ALDA GÍSLADÓTTIR, JAMES M. WOOLLETT, UGGI ÆVARSSON, CÉLINE DUPONT-HÉBERT, ANTHONY NEWTON AND ORRI VÉSTEINSSON archaeological studies detailed below. Many of these same farms had been occupied sometime before the 17th century but were long abandoned by 1712. Other demographic catastrophes such as the plagues at the beginning and the end of the 15th century, might well have played part in these earlier phases of colonisation and contraction. Other more quotidian processes need to be adressed as well, including the impacts on the rural landscape of large-scale economic changes in Iceland related to the expansion of sheep herding for wool production, and political manoeuvring between landowners and clients to secure control over circumscribed resources needed to sustain individual households, as well as the life cycle processes of individual families and resilience of whole communities. Finally, changes in the occupation and utilisation of Svalbarðstunga may stem from managerial decisions made by the benefíce-holder and these may have been affected by a variety of factors, ranging from the personal inclinations and circumstances of the priest (a young and energetic one might be inclined to centrally manage the whole state while an older or less worldly one might be happy to have a minimal operation at the central farm and parcel out the property to small-holders and receive rents from them) to church organisation (as in whether the benefice-holder had other sources of income than the output of his estate), social dynamics within the hreppur (pressure from landless parishioners to receive parcels of land) and ideology (the perceived ills or benefits of smallholding). In order to determine if Svalbarðstunga’s episodic settlement history can be concretely related to general settlement history trends known in Iceland or to documented environmental, socio-economic or historical processes, the primary goal of the project’s archaeological fieldwork undertaken from 2009 to 2012 was to provide as complete an inventory as possible of the outlying elements of the Svalbarð estate. This inventory is detailed in the following section. Field Survey Methods and Inventory of sites in Svalbarðstunga To date, ca. 120 sites have been surveyed in Svalbarðstunga. Those sites have all been located by GPS, mapped, photographed and described in text but more extensive archaeological investigations have been carried out on 15 sites including the midden in Svalbarð. Those will be discussed below. An initial prospection of subsurface archaeological deposits was conducted at each site with an Oakfíeld Soil Tester fítted with a 2 cm tube bit, to describe stratigraphy and soil characteristics. The normal procedure was to core at fixed intervals along regular transects, e.g. 1 - 5 m, although spot cores were taken without transects as initial explorations at each site. The location of core holes was determined through the use of a Garmin GPS, and each core test was described though written notes, and photographed and/or drawn as needed. In many instances, the presence of very visible (and often 80
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Archaeologia Islandica

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