Small Dwellings on the Viking Frontier: New Research from Kotið, North Iceland

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Small Dwellings on the Viking Frontier: New Research from Kotið, North Iceland" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Excavations at Kotið in 2022 and 2023 have revealed a very small, Viking Age domestic dwelling that dates to the initial settlement of Iceland in the late ninth century. Compared to known settlement farms, the site is significantly smaller and lacks access to good farmland even though better land was unoccupied at the time. The site suggests an important social and ecological role for non-elite households in the Icelandic settlement process and requires a new consideration of inequalities and complex relationships among early settler households on the Norse frontier. This poster symposium presents data from multiple aspects of the excavation, including geoarchaeology of the domestic floors and extramural spaces, material culture of adornment items, zooarchaeology and paleoethnobotany, later reuse of the site as agricultural infrastructure, and artistic visualization of the dwelling.