Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2013, Page 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
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