Driftwood, a Lifeline in the Arctic: Production of Artifacts from Driftwood in Northwest Iceland and Norse Greenland

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Iceland was settled by the Norse in the late ninth century and Greenland was settled from Iceland around AD 1000. Although these countries are quite dissimilar in landscape and geology, they have a similar flora in which the only forest-forming tree is birch. Birch alone could not sustain the wood demands of these Norse colonies for prolonged periods of time, but Icelanders and Greenlanders had another wood resource available to them—driftwood. This wood originates in the boreal forests of Russia/Siberia and North America, where trees fall from eroding riverbanks into rivers that carry the driftwood into the Arctic Ocean. In Iceland, one of the most driftwood-rich areas is Strandir in the northwestern fjords. Here, in the recent past, there was a strong woodworking tradition with a level of craft specialization that produced highly sought-after artifacts, furniture, and boats. Not as much is known about the woodworking tradition in Norse Greenland, but recent archaeological research on wooden objects suggests that here, too, driftwood was a very important resource exploited by skilled craftspeople. In this presentation I will discuss literary sources about wood utilization in Strandir and how they can be compared to the archaeological material from Norse Greenland.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33466