Political Ecology Materialized in a Medieval Icelandic Landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Past ecological and political-economic changes are embedded in the materiality of the landscape, and investigating correlations between such changes can suggest how relationships between ecology and economy were structured and managed within past societies. Iceland was first settled in the late ninth century by wealthy Norwegian farmers and their households, whose early efforts rapidly transformed the island from forested wilderness to pastoral landscape. The environmental impact of this settlement is materially evident as deforestation and erosion. A regional archaeological survey of medieval settlements shows that as environmental degradation reached a turning point, people were leaving the very smallest settlements, likely moving to join larger farming households. The abandonment of small settlements illustrates a shift in the way social inequality was organized: early social differences were largest within households, while later status differences were most evident between households, as land ownership became the dominant source of wealth and power. Correlating material evidence of environmental change with that of changing settlement patterns suggests that the rise of interhousehold inequality, and its accompanying political and economic institutions, was enabled and encouraged by landscape transformation. Such an observation is possible only when the full materiality of the landscape is considered.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 29871