Undo

Hæ og komdu sæll,

Believe it or not, my time here at Vatnsfjörður is nearing an end. This is the last proper weekend here in Vestfirðir before I return to Reykavík and then head to Hornbrekka. Weighing heavily on my mind and the minds of the professional archaeologists are three things (1) Open Day tomorrow at Vatnsfjörður (2) Finishing this year´s excavations and (3) closing the site for the year.

OPINN DAGUR Í JÚLI

Tomorrow is open day at Vatnsfjörður! The public is invited for a public lecture and tours all day on site. Normally we don´t work on saturdays, but we will be burning the midnight oil to do some public archaeology. If you recall, I have some limited experience with public archaeology, but my role will be to continue mapping contexts and excavating for Icelandic gawkers. Interesting: Icelanders in general are very modest when they come to the site, shy even, but not the kids. The little brats get into everything.

FINISHING EXCAVATION

Wrapping up the field season this year will be a challenge. From now on, things will be more difficult and a lot of challenging executive decisions will have to be made about what gets excavated and what doesn´t. The banter will be reduced. We will trowel faster. We will have to learn to live with the fact that some things just will not get excavated and we may never understand the relationships between contexts and or buildings.

CLOSING THE SITE

Difficult and intertwined with finishing the excavation. Closing the site is simple really. Turf paper like Americans use under their woodchips for landscaping is laid over sites that may be continued the next year. They are then covered in turf which will begin to grow again over the site. The best way to protect the features is to let nature cushion them. For sites that are complete, turf is simply lain and watered throroughly.

So what is the difficulty? Worms. Worms eat everything. Especially prone to damage are organic rich layers like floors of the Viking Age buildings. Floors are especially valuable. The geoarchaeologists (i.e. Karen Milek) make thin section micromorphology slides that faciliate accurate identification of just about everything in a floor layer. We know what Vikings and and how much from this data. Palaeoentomologists also "chunk" floors to identify insect species, providing more data about the contents of the building.

Worms can destroy all these sources of data in just a few months. This is why it is critical to choose wisely where to spend time resources.

Vertu blessaður,

Nicholas

A context. This particular wall is in the farm mound. Essentially, Icelandic turf houses were constantly under modification. Extended, repaired, ad nauseum. Our job is to tease out how this was done. A turf wall is build by laying stones, layering turf and filling with rubbish. Yes anything. Turf scraps, bones, twigs, clay pipes, watever.

Each context (i.e. layer of turf collapse is one context, the peat ash underneath it, another) must be mapped, photographed, and excavated. Below is a photograph of the wall.



Photo of the farm mound.




Below is a map I drew. It is quite good. A universal Icelandic grid has been set up and points are measured from the grid. The sketch is made from these points. Then salient information is recorded (layer consists of what, thickness, etc)



The next inlet from Vatnsfjörður where I spent the day surveying. This means looking for cairns or other manmade objects in the landscape. We found two. Talk about a dead zone.