Houses and households in early Icelandic society: geoarchaeology and the interpretation of social space ...

• Main Author: Milek, Karen Beatrice
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository 2007
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.15974; https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/245017

This thesis contributes new archaeological evidence to the debate about how early Icelandic society was constituted and organised, and how it developed over the course of its first 200 year,s. It examines Viking Age residential architecture in Iceland at new levels of detail and with new methods, including geoarchaeological techniques to enhance the interpretation of activity areas in individual buildings, and space syntax analysis to facilitate the comparison of houses and the detection of patterns in architectural form. The integration of these different techniques and scales of analysis permits a detailed understanding of how households organised social and economic activities on farmsteads, and sheds new light on the cultural identity of the earliest settlers, the size and complexity of their households, the degree of stratification in early Icelandic society, and how social structures in Iceland changed over time. This thesis examines the excavation data of all Viking Age houses and pit houses that were ...