Uncovering lore (and much more) in Skagafjörður

A few dozen shaggy sheep graze at Stóra-Seyla, a farm in a fjord valley in the northern part of Iceland named Skagafjörður. Beneath them deep in the wind-blown deposits lie the remains that archaeologists believe document the wrenching transition of Iceland from chiefdoms to state. The Skagafjordur Archaeological Settlement Survey (SASS) led by UMass Boston’s John Steinberg has had to develop novel techniques to understand what happened during the transition.

Icelandic history is largely informed by sagas, which give fascinating details into the lives of people living during the Viking and Middle Ages. The level of historical accuracy is widely debated, with some seeing the sagas as fairly accurate while others the texts as mere myth making amongst a hero-obsessed culture. Still others see an unwritten saga that needs to be told.

Iceland was one of the last places on earth to be settled. The first settlers were chieftains, wealthy farmers, and their households fleeing state consolidation in Norway over a thousand years ago. The resulting settlements of chiefs and autonomous farmers meant that each held large territories by virtue of first possession and their ability to muster the might to defend them.

Steinberg’s previous research has demonstrated that about 150 years after the first settlement, smaller farmsteads were split off from the larger, earlier farmsteads. This split was a critical step in the development of a society of landed landlords and tenants, resulting in pronounced disparities in wealth and status. The sagas describe the fierce competition among the thirty chieftains over several hundred years that ended in civil war and the King of Norway taking control of Iceland.

The SASS team is comparing Stóra-Seyla to two other nearby farmstead clusters in Skagafjordur identified in previous survey work. This will provide data to answer questions concerning how chiefly strategies both adapt and fail. For example, were small farms split off as a result of population growth, economic opportunity, or environmental degradation? Answering these and other basic economic questions about the development of social inequality is an objective of the SASS program.

Archeology is difficult in Iceland. There are virtually no trees, so buildings were constructed from turf. Overgrazing caused all the soil from the highlands to eventually blow onto the coastal regions, covering a substantial percentage of the productive land. As a result, the archeology is deeply buried and therefore invisible, especially in the most important areas.

Steinberg, a senior scientist at UMass Boston’s Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, addressed this problem by using sophisticated equipment that measures the electrical conductivity and resistance of soil. The turf used in construction has a much lower conductivity, so electrical patterns reveal where walls are located. Once these buried structures are located, dating their construction material is routine because of the volcanic ash layers that are in the walls and cover them.

Steinberg’s techniques allow rapid excavation with a small crew. “We can see what we are going to find before we find it,” noted Steinberg in an interview this summer on Icelandic television, sparing the landscape from large-scale excavation.

The SASS team has been working in Skagafjörður since 2001. During the excavation this summer, a number of rare finds were uncovered, including a Viking Age ring pin and an unusual copper coin. The ring pin is a plain ring with a polyhedral head. It has a chevron pattern on the shank and a dot pattern on the head. The copper coin is intriguing as most Viking Age coinage was silver.

Steinberg’s ultimate goal is to understand the radical transition in property systems and what it means for sustainability. For centuries, the settlers managed to live in a free state and avoid destroying their land before the transition.

In 2007, Harcourt Trade published a book called The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman, by Nancy Brown which recounts Steinberg’s archaeological advances which Brown observed during her volunteer stint with SASS. They are woven in a story of a chieftain’s daughter-in-law compelled by the exigencies of a feudal economy to sail across the North Atlantic in search of new pasturelands.

The SASS program is funded by the National Science Foundation.