Viking Archaeology in Iceland: Mosfell Archaeological Project ed. by Davide Zori and Jesse Byock (review)

This large-format volume presents the findings of the Mosfell Archaeological Project, commenced in the 1990s and still ongoing at the time of the publication of the book now under consideration. The project has uncovered what has been identified as a Viking chieftain’s farmstead in the Mosfell Valley, about twenty kilometres from Reykjavík. Apart from the residential building, a longhouse, the excavators have discovered what they identify as a pagan cremation site, a conversion era stave church, and a Christian graveyard. In sixteen chapters, an international team of twenty-three scholars presents a remarkably wide-ranging account of the site. The claim in the cover blurb that the project ‘incorporates the disciplines of archaeology, history, saga studies, osteology, zoology, palaeobotany, genetics, isotope studies, place names studies, environmental science, and historical architecture’ is a boast amply justified. The volume moves beyond narrowly focused archaeological reporting to a consideration of what the Mosfell site can suggest regarding the initial centuries of settlement in Iceland (up to the thirteenth century but with the main focus on the ninth to eleventh centuries) and Icelandic interactions with a wider world.

Though, curiously, there is no overt indication of it elsewhere in the book, the introductory chapter by Jesse Byock and Davide Zori indicates that the chapters are organised into five sections: I: Archaeology and History; II: Bioarchaeology, Human Health and Diet; III: Artefacts; IV: Environmental Archaeology; and V: Travel, Trade and Communication. Readers of Parergon more at home in the disciplines of history and literature than in the natural sciences will probably find the first and fifth sections of most interest, especially Chapters 3 and 4 in Section I. In Chapter 3, Byock argues vigorously that earlier archaeologists and historians were wrong to downplay or ignore what medieval texts have to say: ‘In undertaking the Mosfell archaeology, we have found our use of Iceland’s medieval written texts valuable. … we have rejected an outmoded view of Iceland’s medieval histories and sagas’ (p. 41). In Chapter 4, Byock, Zori, and Jón Erlandsson consider a grave site in the light of what is related in Egils saga Skallagrímsson. Their report is certainly fascinating, and the conclusion cautious: ‘Was the empty grave beneath the altar of the church at Hrísbrú the temporary resting place of Egill Skallagrímsson’s bones? The best we can say is that there are a series of extraordinary correlations between the archaeological evidence and the saga account’ (p. 52). But while one might well agree that the complete rejection of saga evidence displayed in the work of the influential Icelandic historian Jón Jóhannesson was excessive, it is well also to remember why, during much of the twentieth century, archaeologists avoided an approach guided by the saga texts, which in the past had led too often to over-hasty and unconvincing identifications of pagan temples, battle sites, burnings, and so on.

Sections II, III, and IV provide scientific papers employing the methodologies of a variety of natural sciences. The papers are accessible to those not specialist in the relevant disciplines, though such readers will probably be unable to make an informed evaluation of the methodologies and conclusions. There are certainly some interesting findings: horse meat apparently continued to be consumed for some time after the conversion to Christianity, for example, and ‘intentional land-use transformation’ (p. 190) seems to have begun in the area shortly before the deposition of the so-called ‘landnám tephra’, dated to c. 871.

The final two chapters, making up the fifth section, restore the historian to more familiar ground: there is an interesting essay on routes, landscape, and power in the area, and an essay on Hedeby in the Danish-northern German borderland which seems of limited relevance to the rest of the volume.

Well...