Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir

The palaeoecology of a high status Icelandic farm

Abstract Written sources indicate that the farm of Reykholt in Borgarfjörður, Iceland was built on the land of the original settlement farm, and that it had acquired the primary status in the valley by the early 12th century. Archaeological evidence suggests that the farm together with a church may have been established as early as ca. 1000 AD, which is when Christianity was adopted in Iceland. The site became one of the countrys major ecclesiastical centres, growing in wealth and stature, not least during the occupancy of the writer and chieftain Snorri Sturluson in the first half of the 13th century. Long-term excavations included a palaeoenvironmental sampling programme aimed at the investigation of the economy and environment of the farm. This paper focuses upon the results of the palaeoecological analysis and places them into the historical context of the farm.

Insect invaders, seasonality and transhumant pastoralism in the Icelandic shieling economy

Abstract The seasonal movement of people and animals to summer farms, or shielings in outfield pastures was a key element of Icelands farming practice for over a millennium. At these sites, cattle and sheep husbandry, dairying and the harvesting of outfield resources took place. Despite their central role in the Icelandic economy, evidence for shielings in the landscape is ambiguous and the identification of a site as a shieling, as opposed to a farm, has relied upon written and place name evidence. The Norse colonists introduced a range of insects in their fodder, stored food, dunnage and ballast. Many of these are unable to live under natural conditions in Iceland and are dependent on people for survival. In 1991 Buckland and Sadler suggested that these species might be expected to be absent at shielings, as the sweepstake of their introduction and the seasonal hiatus in occupation would preclude their successful colonisation. This paper presents new evidence from a sub-fossil insect assemblage, which indicates that some of these insects are present at an Icelandic shieling. The implications of this for discerning the materials imported to shielings and the usefulness of Coleoptera for the identification of seasonality in the North Atlantic is discussed.

A failed invader in the North Atlantic, the case of Aglenus brunneus Gyll. (Col., Colydiidae), a blind flightless beetle from Iceland

The occurrence of an occasional pest of mouldy stored product residues, the blind flightless beetle Aglenus brunneus Gyll., in samples from the medieval farm at Reykholt in Iceland, along with several other strongly synanthropic beetles, is considered in relation to its fossil record. The species is dependent on man for its dispersal and survival and it probably had its primary habitat in the warm, decaying litter of the undisturbed forest floor in Europe. Now virtually cosmopolitan, it had been introduced to a remote site in the eastern desert of Egypt by the Roman period and was widespread in medieval northern Europe. The processes by which such an apparently stenotopic species could have invaded are discussed in relation to other evidence for anthropochorous dispersal.

Charred remains of grains and seeds from the medieval high-status farm site of Reykholt in western Iceland

Abstract Iceland was settled, primarily by peoples from Norway and the northern British Isles, in the 9th and 10th centuries. The first settlers brought with them from their homelands an agricultural system based on animal husbandry, of which cereal cultivation was an element and also with inputs from fishing, hunting and gathering of wild plants. There are strong indications that barley was cultivated during the first centuries in some parts of the country and that cultivation was at least attempted in other areas. However, Iceland is near the climatic limits of the barley-growing zone, and it is open to discussion how reliable a food source locally grown barley would have been. This paper discusses a seed assemblage of cultivated barley and archetypical weeds of cereal crops dated to between the 10th and 12th centuries AD obtained during archaeological excavations at the high status farm of Reykholt in western Iceland.

A Study of Farm Abandonment in Two Regions of Iceland

This article surveys the changing pattern of farm occupation and abandonment in two areas of Iceland, a southern coastal area and an inland area in the east, and examines the causes of change on the basis of documentary, archaeological and tephrochronological evidence. The two areas differ considerably in physical character, which is reflected in their different settlement patterns. Two main causes of abandonment are however evident in both areas, since both contain sites which have suffered from erosion, the most common cause of early abandonment, and sites known in later times to have been abandoned for economic and social reasons. The general pattern in both areas is for settlement to move away from the far inland. In the southern region, coastal erosion has also driven settlement away from the coast. In the past farm abandonment was commonly attributed to simplistic causes. A warning is issued against such generalisations.