| Summary: | During the 2002 field season of the Landscapes of Settlement Project (directed by Fornleifastofnun ĺslands with collaboration by the NABO cooperative) the CUNY team was tasked to locate midden deposits surviving around the medieval to early modern farm mound on the southern side of the home field and assess their prospects for further excavation. Two areas were investigated with small test pits: 1) the area of a midden mound drawn by Bruun in 1908 and subsequently leveled by bulldozer, and 2) a midden concentration to the NE of the area Z excavation unit that had produced bone and artifacts in a test trench profile dug in 2000. The area of the bulldozed midden was approximately located and two 1 x 0.50 m (pits A & B) and one 2 x 0.50 m (pit C) test pits were dug. These showed clear evidence of surviving well stratified cultural deposits directly below the modern turf surface, and all produced small amounts of well preserved bone as well as ash and charcoal. The three pits were otherwise very different in stratigraphy, with pit A showing a deeper deposit marked by multiple in situ tephra (including the LNL sequence and probable medieval tephra above the H4 prehistoric tephra approximately 60 cm below modern surface). This pit did clearly show cultural materials (including some displaced H3 tephra) directly above the probable LNL tephra sequence, but it is not completely clear if turf cutting or other disturbance is the cause of this superposition. The second pit B showed a much shorter total profile, reaching H4 at 40 cm above modern surface and producing ca 20 cm of cultural deposit. LNL and medieval tephra were less evident in this pit. Pit C provided a 2 m continuous profile and yet another set of tephra, including the 1477 (absent in pits A & B) both 1158 and 1104, and a clearly sterile layer separating the cultural material from the LNL sequence. The area Z midden investigation confirmed the presence of an extremely rich early modern (18 th -19 th c) midden overlying a stratified sequence of peat ash and medium brown cultural deposit. It appears that a significant bone and artifact collection could be made in this area documenting the final centuries of occupation, and that earlier midden materials (probably less bone and artifact rich) are preserved below.
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