Using pollen to assess local environmental variation during the Viking Age in Skagafjordur, Iceland

University Of Massachusetts Boston, Dorchester MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Drs. John Steinberg, Heather Trigg, Douglas Bolender and their colleagues will use pollen samples to assess the parameters of environmental change around Viking Age farmsteads in Skagafjörður, Iceland. This work, if successful, will be a prelude to a larger project where the sampling strategy and analysis methods developed during the 2009 season would be applied across a whole range of socio-economic contexts and through the profound changes of Viking Age Iceland. The PI's seek to develop pollen sampling protocols and analysis strategies for investigating local environmental variation during the Viking Age in Iceland. The pollen record can provide a wealth of information about past regional and local environments and how they have changed. Properly assessing these changes around archaeological sites requires a high sampling density (temporal and spatial) as well as suitable counts of tree and non-arboreal pollen. Variation in these parameters can substantially change quality of data recovered beyond issues of time, cost, and area represented. Data collected in this experimental season will assess these parameters in preparation for a much larger future micro-environmental reconstruction project that would incorporate these methods into a regional study of settlement sequence and variation in farmstead production strategies. To establish sampling protocols and analytic strategies the team will investigate two farmsteads in the same region: Reynistaður and Medalheimur. Reynistadur, was one of the first farms settled in the region and was politically and economically prominent during the Viking Age and medieval periods. In contrast, Medalheimur was, in all likelihood, a poor sharecropper farm. The Skagafjörður Archaeological Settlement Survey (SASS) has extensively investigated both farmsteads as part of three previous grants from NSF. Pollen samples will be obtained from already identified archaeological and natural deposits at these two sites. Pollen results will be compared with macrobotanical and faunal evidence. The group will take pollen samples from occupational contexts (middens & dwelling floors), agricultural fields and pastures, and at nearby bogs. At both targeted farms there is macrobotantical evidence of barley consumption, and at Reynistaður, a suggestion of local barley production. Barley does not release a great deal of pollen and it does not travel far. A goal of this proposal is to determine if the team can identify cereal pollen and if so, the location of its production. If not, the potential of using a spectrum of pollen that is associated with grain agriculture as a proxy for local production, will be evaluated. The explicit comparison of the environmental history of successful large farmsteads against small, poor and sometimes unsuccessful farmsteads will allow the research team to answer basic questions about the intersecting roles of landscape change, farm production, and political economy in the early history of Iceland. From that data, The PI's and their colleagues hope to begin to understand the role of the fragile arctic environment in the social evolution of Viking Age chiefdoms to medieval manorial states.