The Variable Resilience of Large and Small Holdings on the Svalbard Estate, NE Iceland: A Multidisciplinary Study of Farm Abandonments Circa AD 1300

Summary

Recent studies have identified an important reorganization of the Svalbarð estate, north-east Iceland around AD 1300. The initial coastal-focused settlement of the region was followed by the founding of new farms in the deep interior. Most were not sustained and some farm sites on the coast were also reduced. Initially, the magnate’s farm of Svalbarð had a herding economy supplemented by fishing while Hjálmarsvík, its coastal neighbor, exploited a diversity of marine resources. Around AD 1300 Svalbarð became the chief consumer of the region’s marine resources and Hjálmarsvík become a more specialized sheep-herding farm resembling other small farms. While this switch occurred during a period in which wool production was on the increase in Iceland, it also corresponds to a phase of climatic cooling. New geoarchaeological and remote sensing data provide a means of resolving the roles of these trends on the Svalbarð estate. These local-scale data enable us to assess inter-site variation in growing season and other landscape productivities and hence to model past landscape productivities, in reference to paleoclimate records and satellite data. In this paper, « predicted » productive potential and vulnerabilities of these farms are compared to archaeological records of occupation, land use and resiliency.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22577