Storied lines : using historical documentation to characterize archaeological connectivity

• Main Author: Pálsson, Gísli
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Umeå universitet, Miljöarkeologiska laboratoriet 2019
• Subjects: archaeology; iceland; history; 18th century; network analysis; postgis; cidoc-crm; assemblage theory; archaeoinformatics; network; Arkeologi; Historia; Iceland
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-164761

As the title suggests, this thesis applies historical documentation as a connective tissue to link together the main conceptual classes in Iceland’s largest SMR, Ísleif. These are the roughly 6000 historic farmsteads used as a classification scheme in Johnsen’s 1847 land census Jarðatal Johnsens. This thesis has three main components. It is primarily an infrastructural work, and most of the time spent on the thesis went into building the underlying database, made in a way to be accessible to a wide audience and integrated with related research infrastructures already in place and in development. Secondly, it is a methodological work, as the highly detailed inter-site relationships encoded in the infrastructure allowed me to model highly contextual networks, which in turn enabled me to develop new methods for modelling archaeo-historical networks by using the computational ontology CIDOC-CRM. Finally, the historiographical component of the thesis investigates the role of networks of interactions between farmsteads in early 18th century Iceland, and more specifically the role of resource claim networks in land use during the post-Reformation and earlier periods.