The Viking package

As a spin-off from his book A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor collated 10 objects emblematic of the Vikings in connection to an exhibition at the British Museum (MacGregor Reference MacGregor2014). Included in the list were weighing scales, a brooch, a silver hoard, a boat burial, an Ulfberht sword and the great long ship from Skuldelev. These objects are clearly special and, although certainly evocative of some of the key traits associated with the Vikings in popular and scholarly imagination—trading and raiding—they are hardly representative of what you might find in excavating a Viking settlement. Archaeologically, the ‘Viking package’ might more typically include items such as steatite vessels, glass beads, oval brooches, ring-headed pins, ‘Thor's hammer’ pendants, composite antler or bone combs, schist whetstones, iron knives, plain swords, axes and spearheads. However, this ‘package’ is very unlikely to be found together in one place; indeed the range of items found in burials is often more iconic in this regard (jewellery and weaponry), whereas on settlements, the finds are generally less spectacular, but also more diverse. Moreover, there are also subtle differences in assemblages from different part of the Viking area; Iceland, for example, lacks cremation burial, and some early scholars like Shetelig even characterized Iceland as a very impoverished version of the mainland corpus (Shetelig Reference Shetelig1937, 210; also see Pétursdóttir Reference Pétursdóttir2009). In general, the impoverishment of the Viking package among the early settlers of Iceland seems to have been a recurring theme among scholars ever since, reinforced by Eldjárn in his survey of Viking burials in Iceland from the 1950s (Eldjárn Reference Eldjárn1956). More ambiguously, it also informs more recent work in framing the material culture associated with landnám sites of the ninth and tenth centuries through the concept of a ‘settler kit’ which is essentially everything a self-respecting Viking needs to transplant their society in a new land (Batey Reference Batey and Sigmundsson2011; Forster Reference Forster2004). Regardless of whether we view this settler package as ‘Viking culture stripped to its bare essentials’ or not, it does nonetheless offer an interesting opportunity to explore the idea of the Viking assemblage in almost ready-made laboratory conditions. To what extent does the archaeological evidence associated with this period actually constitute a coherent and confined assemblage, temporally speaking?

There are essentially two types of sites that have produced evidence for Viking Age material culture in Iceland: furnished burials and settlements. The burials have a research history stretching back to the nineteenth century, providing the backbone for Iceland's Viking Age culture history. Already in the nineteenth century the burials were understood as a subset of Scandinavian burial custom (Kålund Reference Kålund1882) and subsequent debate for a long time concentrated on defining the degree of variance and refining the chronological limits of the grave-good assemblage. The absence of spectacular finds was an early concern, as we have already noted, but in his seminal study of this material from 1956, Kristján Eldjárn came to two principal conclusions: on the one hand the assemblage was reflective of Norse ethnicity and on the other it was overwhelmingly from the tenth century, conforming admirably, in his opinion, to the historical events that framed this material: the settlement of Iceland beginning in the 870s and the conversion to Christianity in 1000. Subsequent finds have not changed these conclusions; the typologically sensitive objects are indeed almost entirely from the tenth century, with only a handful of outliers from the late ninth and early eleventh centuries. In Eldjárn's view, echoed by all authorities until very recently, the grave goods reflected Icelandic culture as a whole from c. 870 to c. 1000. What has changed is that it now seems clear that these artefacts formed a part of ritual practices that were only followed by certain sections of society and only for a limited time within the tenth century. In fact, it looks like a short-lived fashion, peaking in the mid to late tenth century at the same time as other, unfurnished, burial practices were also being introduced (Vésteinsson Reference Vésteinsson, Pedersen and Sindbæk2020; Vésteinsson et al. Reference Vésteinsson, Sveinbjörnsdóttir, Gestsdóttir, Heinemeier and Friðriksson2019; see also Leifsson Reference Leifsson2018). The fact that the majority of furnished burials only have non-diagnostic artefacts, previously understood as a marker of poverty, underlines that the ‘cultural package’ represented by the diagnostic artefacts is only an element of Icelandic tenth-century culture.

The grave-good assemblage has some overlap with the material culture of settlements, but its most conspicuous elements (i.e. those that have received most of the attention even if they are not necessarily the most numerous) are also those least likely to be found in domestic contexts (e.g. brooches and swords). It is those same kinds of artefacts that are mostly absent from later periods, contributing to the sense that there is a marked difference between Viking Age materiality and that of subsequent centuries. A closer look reveals that this is by no means a straightforward matter. There are changes in use, in style, in frequency and in visibility which affect our perceptions of cultural change. When examined in detail it becomes apparent that many different things were happening at different times for different reasons, so the sense of change is primarily created by the grave-goods and their abrupt disappearance is a result of changes in burial custom. It is instructive to look at a few examples.

The most significant change that undoubtedly took place is stylistic. The zoomorphic styles which make the material culture of the Viking Age so distinctive were replaced from around 1100 by the Romanesque, bringing Norse stylistic expression in line with the rest of Catholic Europe. This change is conventionally linked to the conversion to Christianity and seen to mark the post-Viking Age integration of Scandinavian politics and culture with those of its European neighbours. This makes sense as the general context, but the events unfolded over a long period, not at all in an obvious or logical sequence. Furnished burial ceased a century or more before the last of the Viking Age art styles (the Urnes style) lost its popularity in the early twelfth century, and it seems that the female costume, characterized by oval brooches but also several other distinctive jewellery items, became old-fashioned sometime in the interim. These changes can all be seen to relate to a general trend away from separate Scandinavian ways of doing things towards European sensibilities and solutions, but this is also a narrative and point of view which is largely suggested by these very changes. In fact, they all had their separate reasons and historical contexts. It is not at all clear, for instance, that the female costume became unacceptable as ‘Sunday dress’ because of its pagan connotations—this type of dress may have had a good run long after Christianity had begun to permeate and shape people's everyday lives (Sanmark Reference Sanmark2004) and its eventual obsolescence was likely due to something entirely different. The thing is that once furnished burial ceased, our knowledge about female dress evaporates, contributing to a sense that there must have been an abrupt change—but this is not clear at all.

Several quite distinctive types of jewellery did eventually go out of fashion. These include oval brooches, trefoil brooches and bead necklaces, but jewellery as such continued to be used, even if its archaeological visibility is sharply reduced once it was no longer deposited in graves. Similarly, beads, which are found in significant numbers both in burials and Viking Age settlement contexts (Hreiðarsdóttir Reference Hreiðarsdóttir2010), are an example of an object category where there are changes in use which affect frequency but the artefacts as such continue. Bead necklaces had gone out of fashion by the twelfth century, but beads continued to be used as part of dress and in rosaries. In later centuries they are frequently found on church sites, and their numbers increase in the early modern period (Hreiðarsdóttir Reference Hreiðarsdóttir2007). Weapons, similarly, are much reduced in visibility by the discontinuation of furnished burial, but there is good evidence that their use continued. Endemic violence, warfare and individual weapons are described in twelfth- and thirteenth-century chronicles, leaving no doubt about the ubiquity of weapons in post-Viking Age Iceland, and occasional chance finds of weapons back this up.

Steatite vessels, found in burials but much more frequently in settlement contexts, are often seen as the quintessential element of the ‘settler's kit’, utilitarian implements which the settlers are seen to have brought with them at the time of colonization, but which were not replaced by further imports and are as a result mostly found in late Viking Age contexts reused as spindle whorls or gaming pieces. By the twelfth century it seems that the steatite stock had been completely worn out and the material is hardly ever found in domestic contexts thereafter. Steatite vessels occur, however, in later medieval deposits at high-status sites, suggesting that availability as such was not what caused the phasing-out of this material (Forster Reference Forster2004). Combs occur in both burial and domestic contexts in the Viking Age and continue in domestic contexts (Gísladóttir & Snæsdóttir Reference Gísladóttir and Snæsdóttir2019). They change in style, but their frequency seems not to change. Coins are rarely found in burials and occur, along with hack silver, more frequently in settlement contexts or as chance finds. The number of finds peaks in the late eleventh century but cease completely thereafter, and coins are not even found at later medieval trading sites. This change is consistent with a general trend of reduced coin finds in Scandinavia after 1100 (e.g. Jonsson Reference Jonsson2009).

Apart from burials, practically all evidence for Viking Age material culture comes from farmsteads. There is good evidence for widespread settlement in both coastal and inland areas in the decades around 900 (Vésteinsson & McGovern Reference Vésteinsson and McGovern2012) and it used to be thought that the distinctive three-aisled halls with central fireplaces and bow-shaped walls were built by the first wave of colonists, as this was the house type prevalent in the regions they came from in Scandinavia and the Scandinavian settlements in the British Isles. It now appears that this kind of building is almost nowhere securely dated to the earliest period and that it only becomes common in the mid to late tenth century, in the same period as furnished burial, in fact (Vésteinsson Reference Vésteinsson, Garipzanov and Bonté2014). The same pattern is emerging in the Northern Isles of Scotland (D. Griffiths Reference Griffiths, Horne, Pierce and Barrowman2023), suggesting that Norse architectural styles were only adopted by the second or third generation of immigrants from Scandinavia. There are very few securely dated dwellings from the earliest period of settlement in Iceland, but at the only site with fully excavated architecture from before 940 (Sveigakot, in northeast Iceland) people lived in pit-houses and these are widely seen as likely first-phase housing at many sites. Pit-houses are, however, most frequently found as ancillary buildings contemporary to the halls. They are clearly associated with weaving although they may also have served as dwellings for a part of the household (Milek Reference Milek2012). The pit-houses rarely have more than one phase and generally only have tenth-century dates. Their disuse is widely connected to changes in the design of the farmhouse, the three-aisled halls, which start to sprout annexes already before the end of the tenth century. Some of these new rooms were for food storage and cooking, but the biggest change involves the so-called ‘stofa’, often glossed as ‘living room’, where weaving was at least a part of the functions, and this space has therefore been seen as successor to the pit-houses. There is considerable variation, between individual sites as well as regions, in how and when these changes happened, but overall, a development can be seen from farmsteads made up of a single hall plus several detached ancillary buildings towards a more nucleated farmhouse divided into several interconnected rooms (Bolender et al. Reference Bolender, Steinberg and Damiata2011; Ingólfsson Reference Ingólfsson2023; Vésteinsson Reference Vésteinsson2010). This change seems to be taking place between c. 950 and 1150, although the pit-houses appear to go out of use in the earlier part of that period. In the later part the halls become narrower, 3 m instead of 5 m or wider, and their walls become straight instead of bowed (overview of developments in Stefánsson Reference Stefánsson2019).

These changes in architecture and farmhouse layout have traditionally been seen in terms of adaptation: that the settlers brought with them Scandinavian housing conventions but soon learned that they were inadequate for conditions in the new country. Colder climate and lack of timber for building and fuel are then seen as the drivers (Roussell Reference Roussell and Erixon1953; Stefánsson Reference Stefánsson2019). Changes in economic strategies have been similarly explained: an initial emphasis on cattle giving way, by the twelfth century, to more sheep has been seen as an environmental adaptation: with plentiful rangelands but short summers for fodder production, Iceland was more ideally suited to sheep rearing. Shrinking proportions of pigs and goats from the eleventh century have been explained with reference to decreasing woodland cover, a repercussion of human-induced changes to the environment (McGovern et al. Reference McGovern, Vésteinsson and Friðriksson2007). Barley cultivation was widespread in the tenth and eleventh centuries but thereafter limited to the south and west, probably at a much reduced scale compared with the earlier period (Mooney & Guðmundsdóttir Reference Mooney, Guðmundsdóttir, Vanhanen and Lagerås2020). Similarly, there is good evidence for iron production in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but more limited thereafter (Smith Reference Smith, Bork, Montgomery, De Vegvar, Shortell and Walton2005). Some of these changes may be more apparent than real: from the Viking Age there are multiple fully excavated farm sites with large animal bone and artefact assemblages, but for the subsequent centuries the datasets are much fewer and smaller with long periods very patchily represented, if at all (Vésteinsson Reference Vésteinsson2004). This contributes to a sense that the things that characterize the Viking Age and are not observed in later, often much later, centuries, must have ceased at the same time as the Viking Age, but this is an unsafe inference. In some cases, other explanations than adaptation have been offered which then require adjustments to the timeframes, and, interestingly, the patchy state of our datasets seems to allow this. Thus the decline of barley cultivation is for some scholars most obviously a result of climate change (as opposed to the difference in climate between the middle of the North Atlantic and Scandinavia) requiring it to have happened after 1200 when the cooling trend set in. Also, growing sheep numbers have been related to increased textile production for export, a response to growing reliance on imports (Hayeur Smith Reference Hayeur Smith, Ling Huang and Jahnke2015), which can be seen to have been driven either by internal or external forces. Which formulation is chosen affects in what date-range the change is seen to have occurred.

Although there is widespread evidence for human presence and significant human impacts on the environment, the character and material culture of the first one or two generations of settlers is diffuse. This stands in clear contrast to the mid to late tenth century, when there is plentiful material both from burials and settlements. It is interesting that, at the same time as furnished burial had its heyday in the mid to late tenth century—a custom seen to represent the old and soon to be outdated—other innovations were also being introduced. Churches were being built and Christian-style burial began to be practised (Vésteinsson Reference Vésteinsson, Arneborg and Vésteinssonforthcoming)—widely perceived as the beginning of the post-Viking Age—and a system of earthwork boundaries was being constructed, regulating, it seems, property divisions and separating home-ranges from commons (Á. Einarsson Reference Einarsson2019; Einarsson et al. Reference Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson2002). These disparate, and some might say conflicting, developments mark the late tenth century as the single most visible and heavily studied period in Icelandic archaeology. Both the furnished burials and the earthwork boundaries were short-lived phenomena, but their outstanding, although very different, materiality makes them weigh heavily in perceptions of the Icelandic Viking Age at large. To us they look more like fads, not signals of one period ending and another beginning.

Compared to later centuries, the Viking Age looks like a period of rapid change. This perception is created in large part by the much better resolution of the data, compared to the subsequent centuries, and it is given a boost also by the poorly dated changes which tend to get lumped with the end of the Viking Age, even if they may in fact have occurred later. It is furthermore given apparent substance by the introduction of written documents around 1100, a major transformative change that gives a completely different perspective on the before and after. It seems to us that the contrast is to a large extent artificial, an effect of a combination of research bias and new types of sources. The things that most stand out in the Viking Age are primarily those associated with furnished burial, the kind of context that is simply not represented in later centuries. It should be clear from the disparate cases recounted above that changes were occurring throughout the Viking Age; changes to different things, at different times and for different reasons. It was clearly not a case of everything getting imported at the end of the ninth century and staying more or less the same until end of the period. Rather, change was continuous, which begs the question: what is the period made of?

Post-Viking continuity

In contrast to the Viking Age, the later Middle Ages and the early modern period have received comparatively little archaeological attention. Within this much longer time-span the bias in research has been towards high-status sites (monasteries, episcopal seats, manors; e.g. Kristjánsdóttir Reference Kristjánsdóttir2023) and, recently, towards the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Lucas Reference Lucas2012). In historiography, the emphasis has been on continuity or decline and the measures of such, like foreign exchange and production. Interestingly there have been very limited efforts to use archaeological approaches to throw light on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the golden age of literary production in Iceland—which in many ways remains the murkiest period within the underexplored middle part of Iceland's chronology.Footnote ¹

The one narrative thread that connects the archaeology of all periods is that of the development of the Icelandic farmhouse. We saw in the previous section how the Scandinavian-inspired three-aisled halls acquired additional rooms from the late tenth century onwards, but a major change occurred before 1362, when a volcanic eruption buried two farmhouses—Gröf (Gestsson Reference Gestsson1959) and Bær (B. Einarsson Reference Einarsson2020)—which are characterized by a central passage that is standard in all later farmhouse architecture down to the early twentieth century. The central passage completely realigned traffic within the farmhouse, but the functions of the individual rooms remained similar. Two important changes have also appeared in these fourteenth-century buildings: a separate kitchen replacing the central hearth in the hall as the main cooking area, and the appearance of a ‘baðstofa’, a kind of sauna which later got enlarged and became the principal sleeping and working space in the farmhouse. How this change from sauna to bedroom unfolded is unclear and has occasioned much learned debate from Sigurðardóttir (Reference Sigurðardóttir1966, 69–79) to Stefánsson (Reference Stefánsson2019). This is interesting because the innovation of the separate kitchen is much less commented on, yet it clearly had major implications for the status of the housewife and for health as people no longer had to sleep around an open fire. This is an example of a change which has not been accorded narrative significance, whereas the baðstofa issue has long been seen to reflect that things were going badly for the Icelanders after the union with Norway in 1262. The move into the sauna is then seen as a symptom of scarcity and misery: people no longer being able to keep their houses warm and huddling into one small room, the only one they could afford to heat (Stefánsson Reference Stefánsson2019). This theme of scarcity makes sense in the nationalist narrative, which was keen to find evidence for decline and hardship in the periods of foreign domination.

Narratives of continuity stress the permanence to the settlement structure: the accumulation of farm mounds where farmhouses were slowly rebuilt and regenerated on the same spot for a millennium (and frequently nowadays topped by a modern farm building) and the basic elements of the economic system: animal husbandry subsidized by fishing and, to a smaller extent, hunting. These matters seem to represent the basis of the societal structure and in comparison, the changes that can be enumerated can seem trivial. Similarly, in the twelfth century a network of parish churches was erected, which held regular services and had attached cemeteries that served the whole parish. This is in contrast to the Viking period, where small churches with household cemeteries were built at every other farm in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, although they had already started to decline before 1100. These small churches also lost their burial rights at the same time or soon after, but the buildings continued to be used for prayer and household services and only reduced in number very gradually over many centuries—a fair number were still in use in the early eighteenth century (Vésteinsson Reference Vésteinsson, Arneborg and Vésteinssonforthcoming). Around the same time as the establishment of the parish system, several religious houses were founded, lasting until their dissolution in the sixteenth century (Kristjánsdóttir Reference Kristjánsdóttir2023).

And yet there are changes discernible in settlement patterns. From at least the 1700s, a number of settlements show signs of increasing population density, especially trade ports and fishing sites. Much of this is linked to the policy and increased presence of merchants and fishermen/whalers. Architecturally, the changes are very notable at the trading sites, which were scattered around the coast of Iceland, some of which had been in operation since the Middle Ages. Since at least the thirteenth century, if not earlier, trading sites were only seasonally occupied as foreign merchants camped in temporary shelters marked by low turf and/or stone walls during the summer months (e.g. Gásir, Gautavík). These temporary booths are a common feature on seasonally occupied archaeological sites, not just at trading posts but also fishing settlements and assembly sites, and they display a long continuity of form since the tenth century. Although many of the foreign merchants and fishermen used such structures, there are occasional instances of foreign-style timber buildings on these trading sites. The Hanse imported prefabricated German-style buildings and a copper-roofed church at Hafnarfjörður in the sixteenth century (Gardiner & Mehler Reference Gardiner, Mehler, Mehler, Gardiner and Elvestad2013: 7). Over the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Danish merchants also built timber structures at some of their sites, but it was not until the law prohibiting year-round trading was lifted in 1759 that one sees major transformations in the physical appearance of these trading sites. They become more planned, with various permanent buildings, and often enclosed by a perimeter wall/fence (Martin Reference Martin2022, 236–46).

These changes coincide with a mid-eighteenth-century attempt to stimulate the Icelandic economy by various ideas connected to expanding economic production, from salt-making and quern production to horticulture (Beck Reference Beck2020; Guðmundsdóttir Reference Guðmundsdóttir2012; Lucas Reference Lucas2010b; Róbertsdóttir Reference Róbertsdóttir2014; Sigurðsson Reference Sigurðsson2013). All of these initiatives clearly fall within changing ideologies of improvement which are well known archaeologically in other places (e.g. Tarlow Reference Tarlow2009). Among these initiatives in Iceland was the establishment of a joint stock company which came to be known as Innréttingar (‘New Enterprises’). It focused its efforts towards promoting industrial textile production and set up a factory on the farm of Reykjavik, the remains of which have been excavated (Nordahl Reference Nordahl1988; Roberts Reference Roberts2002). Although it only lasted about half a century, it was the catalyst for the development of the first urban settlement in Iceland, transforming Reykjavik from a farm to a town when it was granted its charter in 1786. The changes evident in the merchant centres also impacted the range of goods coming into Iceland, as evidenced in changes to the artefactual assemblages across ordinary farms from c. 1700.

Ceramics occur exceptionally on Viking Age sites and are not generally seen as a part of Viking Age materiality. Their numbers start to increase in the thirteenth century, and they can be expected in very small quantities on ordinary farmsteads from the fourteenth century, although they do not become common until the seventeenth, at least on higher-status sites. It is, however, only in the nineteenth century that pottery can be characterized as at all abundant on most sites (Lucas Reference Lucas and Symonds2010a). Glass is very rare in medieval contexts, primarily associated with ecclesiastical and high-status sites (Lucas Reference Lucas, Gísladóttir, Gestsdóttir and Vésteinsson2020), but becomes more common in household refuse from the seventeenth century, although like ceramics, it is not until the later nineteenth century that it occurs in any substantial numbers on most sites. The increase in both glass and pottery vessels from the seventeenth century is clearly linked to changes in styles of dining, especially as whole new vessel forms appear. A large part of the pottery found from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century are vessels associated with serving and drinking wine (chiefly Rhenish stoneware jugs/tankards), with very little in the way of cooking vessels or other dining wares. It is only in the seventeenth century that a wider repertoire of forms is consistently present, including vessels linked to the consumption of colonial hot beverages, i.e. tea, coffee and chocolate. It is also at this time one sees the arrival of clay smoking pipes for another colonial product, tobacco; the earliest instances in Iceland date from the early to mid seventeenth century and thereafter they are fairly common up to the end of the eighteenth, becoming rarer again in the nieteenth century as snuff and snus become more popular (Lucas & Jónsson Reference Lucas, Jonsson and Hissaforthcoming).

Equally significant was the introduction of knitting in the early sixteenth century (Guðjónsson Reference Guðjónsson1985). This made possible the mass production of small woollens—socks and gloves—by a wider range of the workforce, especially children, and may have spelled the end of the vertical loom which was a fixture of every household down to the end of the Middle Ages but becomes more difficult to trace thereafter (Guðmundsdóttir Reference Guðmundsdóttir2023). Horizontal looms were introduced in the eighteenth century, and so was the spinning wheel, marking major technological advances as well as organizational changes in the household-based textile industry. Although not as prominent as ceramics, glass and clay pipes, these changes in textile production are still visible archaeologically (Hayeur Smith Reference Hayeur Smith2012).

Yet while all these new kinds of objects (and others such as bricks and stove tiles, or dress items like buttons) mark a major change in the archaeological record of Iceland c. 1700, many others show longer continuity from earlier periods. A classic example are stone hammers to beat stockfish which appear around 1300 and become a fixture of all artefact assemblages thereafter, down to the nineteenth century (Árnason Reference Árnason2018). A simple enough innovation, they reflect the growing importance of fishing for household consumption at the same time as its importance as an export commodity was also increasing. Similarly with whetstones used to sharpen blunt blades of scythes, turf-cutters and knives: made from imported Norwegian schist since the tenth century, they are a regular occurrence on sites into the nineteenth century and change little in form (Hansen Reference Hansen2011). Another practice which exhibits long-term persistence is the bi-perforation of metapodials, which appears only in very late or post-Viking Age animal-bone assemblages and continues throughout Iceland's history, even into the early twentieth century (Bigelow Reference Bigelow and Smith1985; McGovern Reference McGovern and Lucas2009). Also found in the Faroes and Shetland, they seem to represent north Atlantic cooking methods, where marrow was extracted from leg bones of sheep by boring a hole rather than cracking the bone, perhaps reflecting a preference for boiling rather than roasting meat. Conversely, other items largely disappear by c. 1700, if not earlier. Norwegian baking plates of schist appear in the twelfth century and continue to the fourteenth, representing an element of Norwegian cuisine—crisp bread (Gísladóttir & Snæsdóttir Reference Gísladóttir, Snæsdóttir, Vésteinsson, Lucas, Þórsdóttir and Gylfadóttir2011)—and may even have lasted into the seventeenth century. Stone spindle whorls, which are a common find from the ninth century, gradually disappear by the fifteenth, to be replaced by wooden ones which do not survive as well, although examples are known (Snæsdóttir Reference Snæsdóttir1981). Similarly, lamps for burning whale/fish oil were made in stone from the ninth/tenth century, but lamps from iron and copper alloy take over from the fifteenth/sixteenth century when candleholders also start to appear.

If the Viking period seems to be a caricature based on an inflation of a much shorter burst of intense social change in the tenth century centred around burials, the post-Viking period has the opposite character: a reduction and eclipse of various changes into one long, bland continuum. Thus the post-Viking period, c. 1100–1900, seems like a very broad canvas, ignoring very classic breaks defined elsewhere in Europe, especially the one dividing the medieval from the modern. At first blush, it seems like a dumping ground for everything in Icelandic history after the golden age of settlement, epitomized in the very term post-Viking, however unofficial that label is. Although one might be tempted to attribute this to a nationalist ideology pervading historical periodization as alluded to earlier, it does not quite fit, as the key cut-off on that basis would be the mid thirteenth century, not the early twelfth. Although certainly an element of nationalism is at play here in terms of the ‘making of a nation’ being linked to the settlement period, of equal import is probably the fact that the twelfth century is also when written sources become available, as mentioned above. In other words, the difference between Viking and post-Viking therefore could equally be labelled as that between prehistory and history—or, more precisely, prehistoric and historical archaeology, as illustrated by debates in Iceland during the 1990s (B. Einarsson Reference Einarsson1994; Friðriksson Reference Friðriksson1994). And although the days have long passed when it was considered that the proper domain of archaeology was its investigation into periods before written sources, anything else being ‘an expensive way of telling us what we already know’, there is no doubt that the legacy of this kind of thinking may still play a role in this division of the Viking and post-Viking periods, especially insofar as far more archaeological time and effort has gone into the excavation and analysis of Viking sites and finds in Iceland.

At the same time, if we wanted to break up this long post-Viking period, it is hard to argue, from the archaeological evidence, for a break at the conventional division of the medieval and modern, i.e. at c. 1500. But then, despite its entrenched position in academia, both historians (e.g. Barraclough Reference Barraclough1955; Gerhard Reference Gerhard1956; Green Reference Green1992; Le Goff Reference Le Goff2015) and a few archaeologists (e.g. Courtney Reference Courtney, Gaimster and Stamper1997; Fagerland & Paasche Reference Fagerland and Paasche2011) have voiced concerns about this divide, pointing to the eighteenth century as a more important century of change. Given that our discussion of the post-Viking period in Iceland has highlighted the eighteenth century over the fifteenth as a major point of change, we may be in good company. And yet one must be cautious here; not everything changes at this time—we have already noted some bigger changes in the nineteenth century and some earlier, in the fifteenth/sixteenth century. Moreover, given the fact that there has been a lot more archaeological work recently on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, our understanding of the archaeological record of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries is comparatively poor. Maybe the eighteenth-century break is an artifact of research bias as much as anything, enhanced by the explosion of written sources that occurs at this time.

Based on this survey of Viking and post-Viking periods in Iceland, it appears that assuming both radical changes at c. 1100 ad and continuity in the succeeding centuries encounters serious problems when examining the data in detail. Summarizing the narrative descriptions in this section, we can roughly map out the chronologies of individual elements in a time chart (Fig. 1), and if we look for ‘natural’ breaks, they are simply not there. This is admittedly a rough sketch. The data are very variable in quality: the dating is often very broad for some items, and added to that, we often have to extrapolate from a few sites or assemblages to the whole country. Furthermore, this chart adopts only a crude presence/absence of elements, whereas frequency might be more subtle. Nonetheless, given these caveats, the chart reinforces our scepticism about Icelandic periodization as it is currently in use.

Figure 1. Time chart of key changes for different elements in the archaeological record of Iceland c. 870–1900 ad.