Fornbýli Landscape and Archaeological Survey on Hegranes (FLASH)

The 2017 field season is starting - last week I was joined in Iceland by 4 more American members of the SCASS team, and everyone else will be joining us later this week!

Ceecee and I started off the season with a larger excavation unit at Kotið, to retrieve a larger sample of faunal materials. We also found a small bone bead -- perhaps it was part of the same fashionable outfit as the bone pin we found here last summer?









We've also started sampling for Loss-on-Ignition analysis, which will tell me about the history of mire formation at each site - how wet were the sites when people lived there, and is did the wetlands change in response to the habitation and use of the site? I plan to sample wetlands from several sites over the summer and will process them in the fall (by burning them in an oven - watch this blog in late August for more).



Finally, check out our new Instagram @scass_iceland!

After a very productive three months in Reykjavík, it's great to be back in Skagafjörður! I'm looking forward to getting back in the field, very soon now, armed with lots of new knowledge about Icelandic wetlands and the classification of ruins. My Icelandic has improved a lot, too: at Háskóli Íslands, I listened to lectures and read articles in Icelandic almost every day. I'm still not a very confident speaker, but I'm sure I'll get there!

Yesterday (Páskadagur, Easter Sunday) was gloriously sunny here in Sauðárkrókur, and I took a walk up behind the town, all the way to the fence that marks the entrance to the afrétt (the communal summer pastures on the high mountains, where sheep spend most of the summer months).



One of my favorite things to do in Reykjavík (aside from working on my research, and exploring the city and the landscape) was to volunteer at Kattholt! Kattholt is a shelter that takes in lost and stray cats, caring for them while they wait to go home. They also run a cat hotel. And you might have heard of the greatest reality show in the world, Keeping Up with the Kattarshians - that's run by Kattholt too! (Kattar = the genitive form of cat in Icelandic.)



If you'd like to know more about Kattholt (and you read Icelandic), check out this interview I gave to Fréttatíminn.

As always, you can find more pictures of my exploits at Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram (via the links in the sidebar).

Last week I took a short side trip to Oslo, Norway, where my colleague Guðný Zoëga was defending her dissertation at the University of Oslo (til hæmingju! -- that means congratulations!). While I was there, I took the time to go visit a few of the most famous exhibits from the Viking world:





These are only a few of the things I did in Oslo! I loved the city and can't wait to visit again.

Last Friday, I went to Akranes, a town about 40 minutes north of Reykjavík, to visit the offices of the National Land Survey of Iceland - Landmælingar Íslands - to look at their collection of air photos that date back to the 1950s. Although lots of changes happened to the land in the late 20th century, including expanding hayfields, building new roads, and draining wetlands, most of these activities were only just beginning in Skagafjörður in the 1950s and 60s. These images will give us a rare glimpse at the older agricultural landscape of Hegranes.

The last few months have been rough as an American abroad, and at times it has been hard to strike a balance between staying informed and active about the horrifying political situation at home, and carrying out the research and ambassadorship that is the reason I'm here in Iceland. I've also been dealing with a painful medical issue that has taken some of my attention away from research. Nonetheless, despite these two large distractions, I've had a very fun and productive fall in Sauðárkrókur, and have now settled in Reykjavík where I will stay until April.

I've continued to work hard at improving my Icelandic, exhausting the resources at the Skagafjörður archives, and finishing my 2016 excavation report as well as a few other writing projects. I'll be continuing to work on all of these things over the course of the spring, as well as taking advantage of the research materials at the National Library and National Museum, and taking two courses at the University of Iceland. Both are taught in Icelandic, so I will be getting a lot of language practice over the next few months!

I attended numerous concerts and events over the Christmas season, both in Skagafjörður and Reykjavík, and my family visited for the week between Christmas and New Years, just in time for a week of wind and snowstorms! And I've been continuing to update my Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr, even when I haven't been posting to this blog: links are in the left sidebar.

The days are starting to grow longer again, and Reykjavík, being a few degrees south of Sauðárkrókur, already has about an extra hour of daylight. The darkness hasn't affected me too much, though it is difficult to disentangle darkness-related melancholy from the aforementioned ongoing global political nightmare. I gave a talk at TAG in Southampton, UK, in December, and seeing the sun stream through my window - not even at much of an angle! - was fairly glorious! But in general I am the sort of person who likes the darkness. It makes it easier to see the Northern Lights, for one thing.

Now that floating is winding down (just a few more samples to bag, and then I can mail them all off!) I have started spending more time at the Skagafjörður archives here in Sauðárkrókur. I've been reading the diary of Ólafur Sigurðsson, the farmer at Ás, who moved there in 1854 and began keeping the diary on January 1, 1855. (Yes, I'm reading someone's diary and then posting about it on the internet.) It's terse, short writing: he writes one line each day, a few words about the weather and then a statement about something he did. I'm only partway through 1856 - my Icelandic isn't good enough yet to read it quickly, and even so, there are a lot of words he uses in an older sense that I have to dig through the 1874 dictionary to find, like útræna, a breeze from the sea, which google translate insists means exogenous. Even so, I'm getting a vivid picture of this man's life. He has a steady stream of visitors and often goes to work with other farmers, especially his friend Páll. He also mentions Elizabeth a lot - he talks about her like a wife, though other records show he was married to a Sigurlaug Gunnarsdóttir, not sure what's up with that; anyway Elizabeth went away for a few days at the end of November, and Ólaf's entries for those days are just a terse "Eins - eins - eins" (same - same - same) until finally "kom Elizabeth heim" (d'awww). Ólafur also seems to be a coffin-maker, every few months he talks about making one and burying people, including a man and woman from the farm of Rein with a few weeks of each other. On one particularly heartbreaking day in May, "fjúkarlæðingar varð hér að vatni; jarðað barnið"; my best guess at translation is that "an avalanche caused a flood; buried a child."

In other words, I keep getting distracted from my actual purpose in reading these documents, which is to look for any mention of the fornbýli so I can discuss specifically what they were used for in the 19th century. The closest I've come so far - and again, I'm only in 1856 - is that he spends a lot of time in August of 1855 visiting and fixing up rústir/rústinum/rústum/rústabakka (all variations on "the ruins"), and then he brings horses there. No mention of a place-name or where on the landscape it's located, but this is a good example anyway of re-use of old places! Maybe he'll learn place-names as he spends more years farming the land at Ás - we shall see.

Oh, and Ólafur's handwriting is absolutely gorgeous:


ETA: I have been informed that "rústir" in this context probably refers to a cryoturbated boggy area, rather than ruined structures. Still more work to do!

Hvað ertu að gera? I've been working out by the harbor over the last few weeks, whenever the rain and wind aren't too strong, next to the old Kiwanis hut where SCASS is storing all our archaeological equipment until next summer's field season. The hut is beside the Fisk Seafood processing plant and offices, which employs a large number of people in Sauðárkrókur. People can see me from their windows at work, so I get this question a few times a day: hvað ertu að gera, what are you doing?

Beautiful afternoon for floating! Let's find some barley from Kriki!

A photo posted by Kathryn Catlin (@whyisthiskat) on Sep 5, 2016 at 8:17am PDT

I try to answer in broken Icelandic, and I usually get as far as "ég er fornleifafræðingur frá Bandaríkjunum og ég vinna með Byggðasafn Skagfirðinga" (I'm an American archaeologist working with the museum) before I resort to "talarðu enska?" (Do you speak English?). Often the answer is "a little" with a smile, and then I can launch into a description of what I'm doing out there, with my steaming tub of muddy water and colorful chiffon. So here's a longer explanation of macrobotanical flotation, for the blog!

Macrobotanicals are archaeological plant remains, usually seeds: "macro" distinguishes these samples from pollen or phytoliths, which can only be seen under a microscope. Looking at plant remains from the past can tell us a lot about what the environment was like at the time. The proportion of different species present in a sample suggests whether the landscape may have been forested, wetland, or heath, for example. Agricultural crops are also a big factor in macrobotanical analysis: what kind of crops were people growing, if any, and how did agriculture differ across the landscape and between sites? Seeds can also tell us what people were eating or feeding their animals, and what kind of food were imported at different points in time. These data sets help answer questions about diet, health, economy, and social relationships in the past. It's a technique used in archaeological research projects all over the world.

In Iceland, one of the most significant results from macrobotanical analysis has been the presence or absence of barley seeds. The usual narrative of agricultural history in Iceland says that although some arable agriculture was practiced during the Settlement Period, the climate of Iceland was such that only barley was hardy enough to survive, and even barley could not be grown later into the medieval period as the climate continued to cool. It's also been suggested that barley was primarily grown by powerful landowners with large farms. So finding barley helps us answer questions about environment, economy, and society. Barley at any of the fornbýli that are the focus of my dissertation would be particularly interesting, as it calls into question several assumptions about social status and economic production in medieval Iceland. And one more thing -- charred barley is the best possible sample to send to the lab for radiocarbon dating.

So macrobotanical samples are one of the most important data sets we collect. And the way we get them is by a technique called flotation.


Collecting a flotation sample from a midden at Kriki.



It starts by collecting samples in the field, during an excavation. From every layer we excavate, we collect a bulk soil sample, anywhere between 2-15 liters depending on the size of the deposit. These are mostly from middens - trash deposits where people left the remains of meals, food preparation, and often animal dung, all of which are likely to include seeds.

Next we have to separate the seeds from the soil, which is where flotation comes in. Put seeds in water, and they float to the top. Dirt, rocks, bones, and most other stuff found in middens falls to the bottom. The simplest way to do this is to dump the sample in a bucket, swish it around, and skim off what floats to the top. I'm using a slightly more complicated machine; here's a diagram of a similar machine, which I've borrowed from this webpage.



Water flows into the tank from the bottom (hot water! this is Iceland after all) and percolates up into a removable tank with a mesh bottom. As I dump the sample into the tank, seeds, charcoal, roots, and other light particles float to the top. The water carries these light particles out of the spout at the top of the tank, where they fall into a waiting chiffon mesh: the water flows through the chiffon and out into the harbor, leaving behind the seeds for me to collect into a bundle and hang to dry. Heavier objects - mostly stones, with some bones, charcoal, slag, and occasionally other artifacts - fall to the bottom of the mesh, so when I'm satisfied that I've collected all the seeds from the sample, I pick up the removable inner tank and clean the heavy fraction out of the mesh, gathering it into a second chiffon mesh which I also hang to dry. The dirt flows through the mesh and forms a sludge in the bottom of the tank which I clean out periodically, usually two or three times a day if I'm floating all day.

Float float float float float pt. 2

A photo posted by Kathryn Catlin (@whyisthiskat) on Sep 21, 2016 at 11:05am PDT

Samples hanging up to dry!

Once the samples are dry, I move them from the chiffon to a smaller ziploc bag, making sure all the context information is still on the label. Once I'm done (hopefully by the end of September), the whole collection will be sent to the laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where specialists (usually historical archaeology MA students) will sort through the heavy fractions, and will look at the light fractions through a microscope, counting the seeds of each species that are present. And any charred barley, once it's been identified, will be sent on to yet another lab for radiocarbon dating.

I'm bagging flotation samples today! Here's a very shiny piece of slag from one of this summer's heavy fractions.

A photo posted by Kathryn Catlin (@whyisthiskat) on Sep 6, 2016 at 7:50am PDT

Eventually, all these samples will be processed and the results entered into our database, and then I'll be able to use the data in my dissertation! **\o/**

Float float float float float

A video posted by Kathryn Catlin (@whyisthiskat) on Sep 20, 2016 at 3:22pm PDT

How did I get this lucky?

I'm back in Sauðárkrókur now, after a few weeks home in the US after the end of the summer season, and I'm settling in to start my Fulbright year of writing and research. I've lived in this town for at least two weeks out of each of the last seven summers, bar one (in 2010 it was Greenland instead). I think I know this town and this fjord reasonably well by now, but moving from a temporary summer visitor to a more longer term resident is already changing my perceptions, little by little.

For instance, this evening there were a lot of low clouds in the back of Skagafjörður, and clearer skies with just a few clouds to the north. In summer this often portends a lovely sunset in both directions, so I went out with my camera. Of course, I knew the sun would no longer set to the north, over the fjord- it had already stopped doing that by the middle of August at the end of the field season, when I and my American colleagues went home. I climbed up the hill behind the track, in search of a vantage, to find that the sun no longer even sets over Tindastoll, but much farther south and west, already over the next mountain. With so much solid rock between me and the evening sun, I may be all out of sunsets for the year- if I learn otherwise I will report back!

Here's the best photo from tonight, looking far to the west of town (if I'd been thinking I'd have moved a bit so as to avoid the horse trailer in the foreground):

After finishing up the test unit at Kotið (see the previous post), I took the Dream Team coring at Minni-Egg (that's me, Eric, Ceecee, and Alicia - all of us are PhD students who have been working in Iceland for the last several years).


Ceecee and Eric coring at Minni-Egg

I hoped to start a test pit at Minni-Egg, but as yet we haven't been able to located a medieval midden here amongst the later ruins of an outbuilding and field wall. I have a few more spots I'd like to check out, but it seems as though Minni-Egg may not have been inhabited during the 9th-13th centuries; or if it was, all evidence may have eroded away.

Since we didn't find a place to excavate at Minni-Egg, I had a somewhat free day on Friday, so I went to Reynir at the south end of Hegranes with Doug's team. Reynir is a much larger farmstead ruin than the sites I'm primarily investigating, with evidence of long-term habitation in the early medieval period as well as surface ruins of 19th century barns, gardens, and field walls.


The landscape of Reynir. In the middle distance, two dark spots on a light green hill are Jared and Ceecee, working on the test unit (right-click -> view image to see it larger). You can see the faint echo of a field boundary a little closer to the camera. At the bottom of the photo is an early modern structure (probably a sheephouse or shepherd's hut), constructed after 1300. I thought it was a good candidate for early settlement, similar to the fornbyli I've been surveying, but a few cores around the structure showed no evidence of earlier activity.

Earlier last week, I built a pair of new, lightweight screens to carry to distant sites. I posted a few photos of the construction process on my Iceland tumblr - check them out here. We primarily find animal bones and some iron objects in early middens, with the occasional small find (see my previous post), so we need to screen all midden contexts to make sure we catch them all. The Reynir team tested one of my new screens, and so far they are working great!


Ceecee using one of the new and improved screens at Reynir!

You should definitely go visit Ceecee's blog for more photos and descriptions of what we're all doing up here in Skagafjörður all summer!