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of upland pastures, and the ecologically sound strat-

egy of diversiﬁed resource use (“putting his liveli-

hood on many footings”) attributed to Skallagrim

are also now clearly reﬂected in the archaeological

record of landnám. Equally intriguing are the hints

of a centralized settlement strategy involving both

initially wide holdings by a single chieftain and care-

ful arrangement of tenant farms to validate and ef-

fectively exploit the ﬁrst comer’s claim. The area

said in the thirteenth-century saga to have been

claimed in the ninth century by the industrious

Skallagrim would contain the residences of four

major chieftains in the thirteenth century as well as

up to three hundred smaller farmsteads. The “Skal-

lagrim strategy” would have the effect of establish-

ing a wide scatter of settlements over a large area

(intentionally including many environmental

zones). It would also account for some of the unex-

pectedly early dates for settlements at higher eleva-

tions or less-desirable locations documented by ar-

chaeology in the late twentieth century and after,

suggesting a rapid widespread population dispersal

into all potentially habitable sites rather than a more

gradual expansion outward from favored coastal lo-

cations. The residue of planned settlement expan-

sion may be visible in later patterns of farm settle-

ment in both Greenland and Iceland, which show

considerable regularity in farm spacing and may re-

ﬂect landnám-age allotments.

It seems likely that the politics of landnám in-

volved the competitive interaction of a range of dif-

ferent strategies by chieftains, middle-ranking farm-

ers, and the lower-ranking servants and slaves whose

unsung labor was so vital to the success of the ﬁrst

settlements. Although the process of landnám in

Iceland and Greenland is only beginning to be un-

derstood, research in many interrelated ﬁelds is

making clear that the ﬁrst century of settlement saw

rapid change and transformation of both nature and

human society that was to have profound and last-

ing impact on the history of the whole region.

See also Animal Husbandry (vol. 2, part 7); Viking

Settlements in Orkney and Shetland (vol. 2, part

7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amorosi, Thomas, Paul Buckland, Andrew Dugmore, Jon

H. Ingimundarson, and Thomas H. McGovern. “Raid-

ing the Landscape: Human Impact in the Scandinavian

North Atlantic.” Human Ecology 25, no. 3 (1997):

491–518.

Arneborg, Jette. “The Norse Settlement in Greenland: The

Initial Period in Written Sources and Archaeology.” In

Approaches to Vinland. Edited by Andrew Wawn and

Thórunn Sigurðardóttir, pp. 122–133. Reykjavik, Ice-

land: Nordahl Institute, 2001.

Arneborg, Jette, Jan Heinemeier, Niels Lynnerup, Henrik L.

Nielsen, Niels Rud, and Arny E. Sveinbjornsdottir.

“Change of Diet of the Greenland Vikings Determined

from Stable Carbon Isotope Analysis and C14 Dating

of Their Bones.” Radiocarbon 41, no. 2 (1999): 157–

168.

Arneborg, Jette, Jan Heinemeier, Niels Lynnerup, Niels

Rud, and Arny E. Sveinbjornsdottir. “C14 dateringer af

mennesknogler med de gro

⁄

nlandske nordboer some ek-

sempl.” Hikuin 27 (2000): 307–314.

Bigelow, Gerald F., ed. The Norse of the North Atlantic.

Acta Archaeologica, no. 61. Copenhagen, Denmark:

Munksgaard, 1991.

Buckland, Paul C. “The North Atlantic Environment.” In

Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga. Edited by William W.

Fitzhugh and Elisabeth Ward, pp. 227–268. Washing-

ton, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Buckland, Paul C., et al. “Bioarchaeological and Climato-

logical Evidence for the Fate of the Norse Farmers in

Medieval Greenland.” Antiquity 70 (1996): 88–96.

Dugmore, Andrew J., and C. C. Erskine. “Local and Re-

gional Patterns of Soil Erosion in Southern Iceland.” In

Environmental Change in Iceland. Edited by Johann

Stötter and Friedrich Wilhelm, pp. 63–78. Münchener

Geographische Abhandlungen series B, vol. 12. Mu-

nich: Institute for Geography, University of Munich,

1994.

Fredskild, Bent. “Agriculture in a Marginal Area: South

Greenland

A.D. 985–1985.” In The Cultural Land-

scape: Past, Present, and Future. Edited by H. Birks, pp.

28–35. Mons, Belgium: Botanisk Institute, 1986.

Friðriksson, Adolf. Sagas and Popular Antiquarianism in

Icelandic Archaeology. Aldershot, U.K.: Avebury, 1994.

Hreinsson, Viðar, ed. “Egil’s Saga.” In The Complete Sagas

of Icelanders: Including Forty-nine Tales, vol. 1, p. 66.

Reykjavik, Iceland: Leifur Eiriksson, 1997.

Jacobsen, B. H. “Soil Resources and Soil Erosion in South

Greenland: An Attempt to Estimate Soil Resources in

the Norse Period.” Acta Borealia 1 (1991): 56–68.

Jones, Gwyn. The Norse Atlantic Saga: Being the Norse Voy-

ages of Discovery and Settlement to Iceland, Greenland,

and North America. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1986.

McGovern, Thomas H. “The Demise of Norse Greenland.”

In Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga. Edited by William

W. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth Ward, pp. 327–340. Wash-

ington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

VIKING SETTLEMENTS IN ICELAND AND GREENLAND

ANCIENT EUROPE

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———. “The Archaeology of the Norse North Atlantic.”

Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 331–351.

McGovern, Thomas H., G. F. Bigelow, Thomas Amorosi,

and D. Russell. “Northern Islands, Human Error, and

Environmental Degradation: A Preliminary Model for

Social and Ecological Change in the Medieval North

Atlantic.” Human Ecology 16, no. 3 (1988): 45–105.

(Reprinted in Case Studies in Human Ecology. Edited by

Dan Bates and Susan Lees. New York: Plenum Press,

1996.)

McGovern, Thomas H., and Sophia Perdikaris. “The Vi-

kings’ Silent Saga: What Went Wrong with the Scandi-

navian Westward Expansion.” Natural History (Octo-

ber 2000): 50–56.

McGovern, Thomas H., Sophia Perdikaris, and Clayton

Tinsley. “Economy of Landnam: Evidence of Zooar-

chaeology.” In Approaches to Vinland. Edited by An-

drew Wawn and Thórunn Sigurðardóttir, pp. 154–166.

Reykjavik, Iceland: Nordahl Institute, 2001.

Morris, Chris D., and D. James Rackham, eds. Norse and

Later Settlement and Subsistence in the North Atlantic.

Glasgow, Scotland: Glasgow University Press, 1992.

Ogilvie, Astrid E. J., L. K. Barlow, and A. E. Jennings.

“North Atlantic Climate c.

A.D. 1000: Millennial Re-

ﬂections on the Viking Discoveries of Iceland, Green-

land, and North America.” Weather 55, no. 2 (2000):

34–45.

Ogilvie, Astrid E. J., and Thomas H. McGovern. “Sagas and

Science: Climate and Human Impacts in the North At-

lantic.” In Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga. Edited by

William W. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth Ward, pp. 385–393.

Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,

2000.

Olafsson, Guðmundur. “Eiriksstaðir: The Farm of Eirik the

Red.” In Approaches to Vinland. Edited by Andrew

Wawn and Thórunn Sigurðardóttir. Reykjavik, Iceland:

Nordahl Institute, 2001.

Simpson, Ian A., Andrew J. Dugmore, Amanda Thomson,

and Orri Vésteinsson. “Crossing the Thresholds:

Human Ecology and Historical Patterns of Landscape

Degradation in Iceland.” Catena 42 (2001): 175–192.

Simpson, Ian A., W. Paul Adderley, Garðar Guðmundsson,

Margrét Hallsdóttir, Magnús A. Sigurgeirsson, and

Mjöll Snæsdóttir. “Soil Limitations to Agrarian Land

Production in Premodern Iceland.” Human Ecology 30,

no. 4 (2002): 423–443.

Vésteinsson, Orri. “A Divided Society: Peasants and Aristoc-

racy in Medieval Iceland.” In New Approaches to Medi-

eval Iceland. Edited by Árni Daniel, Daníel Júlíusson,

and Orri Vésteinsson. Glasgow, Scotland: Glasgow

University Press, 2002.

———. “The Archaeology of Landnám: The Shaping of a

New Society in Iceland.” In Vikings: The North Atlantic

Saga. Edited by William W. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth

Ward, pp. 164–174. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian

Institution Press, 2000.

———. “Patterns of Settlement in Iceland: A Study in Pre-

History.” Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern

Research 25, no. 1 (1998): 1–29.

Vésteinsson, Orri, Thomas H. McGovern, and Christian

Keller. “Enduring Impacts: Social and Environmental

Aspects of Viking Age Settlement in Iceland and Green-

land.” Archaeologia Islandica 2 (2002).

Wawn, Andrew, and Thórunn Sigurðardóttir, eds. Ap-

proaches to Vinland. Reykjavik, Iceland: Nordahl Insti-

tute, 2001.

HOMAS H. MCGOVERN

■

HOFSTAðIR

The Viking Age site of Hofstaðir is located in north-

ern Iceland, on the upper Laxá River near Lake

My´vatn. The ruins ﬁrst attracted attention during

the late-nineteenth-century Romantic antiquarian

revival as a potential pagan temple site. (The name

can be translated as “temple farm.”) In 1908 the

Danish archaeologist Daniel Bruun and the philolo-

gist Finnur Jónsson carried out one of the ﬁrst pro-

fessional excavations in Iceland on the site, revealing

an exceptionally large long hall and a rich midden

deposit ﬁlling a circular depression just to the south

of the hall. Bruun and Jónsson concluded that this

great hall was in fact a pagan temple, with a sacred

chamber at the north end of a great gathering hall,

and for years the site has been used to illustrate dis-

cussions of pre-Christian Nordic religion. The orig-

inal conclusion was disputed by Olaf Olsen, who

carried out small-scale re-excavations in the mid-

1960s and argued that there were no specialized

pagan temple sites but rather chieﬂy “temple farms”

combining many functions.

New international, interdisciplinary investiga-

tions began at Hofstaðir in 1992 under the direc-

tion of Adolf Friðriksson and Orri Vésteinsson

and continued into the twenty-ﬁrst century. The

Hofstaðir excavations have expanded into a re-

gional scale investigation of early settlement and

human environmental impact in the My´vatn area.

They have also brought the insights of zoo-

archaeology, archaeobotany, human osteology,

tephrochronology, geoarchaeology, and environ-

7: EARLY MIDDLE AGES/MIGRATION PERIOD

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ANCIENT EUROPE

mental modeling to bear on the complex interac-

tions of human politics, economy, and social orga-

nization with soils, vegetation, and a changing

climate. Structural work at the Viking Age portion

of Hofstaðir was completed in the summer of 2002,

and analysis of structures, ﬁnds, and chronology

continued.

The early-twenty-ﬁrst-century excavations at

Hofstaðir have conﬁrmed Bruun’s general conclu-

sion that the main building was an impressively

large hall, with four times the ﬂoor space of the av-

erage Viking Age dwelling. The systematic open-

area excavation of Friðriksson and Vésteinsson’s

teams has added greatly to this picture, document-

ing a series of outbuildings—some freestanding and

others connected to the main hall building. These

buildings include an early timber-framed structure

(whose sod walls clearly were added later for insula-

tion and probably were not load bearing) with a

beam-slot construction not used in later Icelandic

structures. This structure changed in use: plant phy-

tolith analysis and soil micromorphological work by

Karen Milek (of Cambridge) indicates that what

had been a dwelling ﬂoor was turned into a hay

store. A few meters away a small outbuilding stood

beside one of the hall entrances, with a refuse pile

nearby. This outbuilding was solidly constructed

with a stone-lined trench down the side and a super-

structure supported by large posts.

Analysis of the pit ﬁll suggests that this probably

was one of the communal privies described in the

later saga texts. This substantial and well-built struc-

ture certainly was not hidden and, in fact, may have

been a mark of status in the Viking Age. Although

the interior of the great hall had been damaged by

the earlier excavations of Bruun, enough remained

untouched to allow documentation and recovery of

most of the ﬂoor layers and the many postholes pen-

etrating into subsoil beneath. The entire surviving

ﬂoor deposit has been sampled systematically for

soil micromorphology and ﬂotated for botanical

and insect remains by Garðar Guðmundsson and

should provide new insight into the organization

and use of the interior space. The many postholes

and stake holes penetrating to subsoil indicate fairly

extensive interior partitioning, and bones and small

artifacts were deliberately placed at the bottom of

several holes before the support was inserted. The

great hall was certainly a complex construction that

consumed a great deal of wood as well as turf and

stone, representing a major investment of wealth

and prestige in this early community.

Just to the south of the end of the great hall was

the circular depression (area G) investigated by

Bruun and Olsen. Bruun noted the large amount of

well-preserved animal bone and described the de-

posit as a midden similar to those he had encoun-

tered in his excavations of Norse sites in Greenland.

Expansion of the original trenches into an open-

area excavation revealed that the feature was an ex-

ceptionally large and deep pit house, an ancient

Nordic/Germanic/Slavic building type often

found at Early Settlement Age (

A.D. 874–930) sites

in Iceland. It was ﬁlled with stratiﬁed layers of well-

preserved animal bone as well as bone, stone, and

metal artifacts, smithing slag, charcoal, ash, and ﬁre-

cracked stones. These deposits are still under analy-

sis, but it is clear from the refuse that Hofstaðir was

a full-scale working farm, with bones from all the

Norse domestic animals found in all stages of butch-

ery and consumption and extensive evidence of iron

smelting from local bog ore. Recovered animal

bones will provide a detailed picture of the changing

economy at this important site and can be compared

with similar deposits (some also ﬁlling pit houses)

at other nearby Settlement Age sites.

Although Hofstaðir was certainly a chieftain’s

farm at its height in the late tenth to early eleventh

centuries, the artifacts recovered are not particularly

rich. A few small fragments of silver jewelry, a classic

bronze ring pin, several glass beads, some worn

knife blades, and a few single-sided composite bone

combs are the exceptional ﬁnds; rusted iron nails are

by far the most common artifactual ﬁnds. Evidence

of volcanic tephra found under walls and radiocar-

bon dates suggest that Hofstaðir was not one of the

ﬁrst farms settled in the area (soon after

A.D. 871)

and that the peak period of the great hall may date

to c.

A.D. 950–1000. Its rise to temporary promi-

nence may reﬂect the dynamic and competitive na-

ture of chieﬂy politics during the Settlement Age.

The great hall at Hofstaðir certainly marked a

brieﬂy substantial chieftain’s farm, but it also seems

to have had ritual associations. When the hall was

abandoned c.

A.D. 1000, two sheep were beheaded

and the bodies thrown onto the ﬂoor, the heads

landing nearby. At the same time, skulls of cattle,

sheep, goat, and pigs that apparently had been dis-

HOFSTAðIR

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443

played outside along the roof were thrown down

into the wall collapse or dumped together in a pit

in one of the side rooms of the hall. A sheep skull

was placed in each of the doorways, and then the

whole farm was moved 150 meters across the home

ﬁeld, where a medium-sized turf farm and a small

Christian chapel survived through the medieval pe-

riod. The Viking Age ruins with the enigmatic great

hall were never reoccupied and were left undis-

turbed for a thousand years.

See also Viking Settlements in Iceland and Greenland

(vol. 2, part 7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Friðriksson, A., Orri Vésteinsson, and T. H. McGovern.

“Recent Investigations at Hofstaðir, Northern Ice-

land.” In North Atlantic Environmental Archaeology.

Edited by R. Housely. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2003.

Vésteinsson, Orri. “Patterns of Settlement in Iceland. A

Study in Pre-History.” Saga-Book of the Viking Society

25 (1998): 1–29.

Vésteinsson, Orri, T. H. McGovern, and Christian Keller.

“Enduring Impacts: Social and Environmental Aspects

of Viking Age Settlement in Iceland and Greenland.”

Archaeologia islandica 2 (2002): 98–136.

HOMAS H. MCGOVERN

7: EARLY MIDDLE AGES/MIGRATION PERIOD

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EARLY MIDDLE AGES/MIGRATION PERIOD

VIKING SETTLEMENTS IN ORKNEY AND SHETLAND

■

The Orkney and Shetland archipelagos were among

the smallest regions settled by Norwegians during

the Viking Expansion that took place c.

A.D. 800–

1100. However, many years of multidisciplinary re-

search have revealed that these northernmost Brit-

ish Isles played signiﬁcant roles in the politics and

economies of the Viking World of the North Atlan-

tic and the North Sea. From their earliest settle-

ments by Neolithic agriculturalists in the fourth mil-

lenium

B.C., the “Northern Isles of Scotland,” as

Orkney and Shetland are known collectively, served

as the northwestern frontier of the Eurasian land-

mass, and any westward movements of people,

ideas, and domestic plants and animals stopped

there. When the islands were settled by the Norse

in the early medieval period, their peripheral status

was transformed as they became the ﬁrst stepping

stones in an epic transoceanic migration that ended

in North America. At that point, Orkney and Shet-

land became the gateway to the North Atlantic and

a crossroads between Britain and Scandinavia.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXT

To better understand the ﬁrst Viking contacts with

Orkney and Shetland and the eventual Norse settle-

ment of the islands, it is necessary to examine the

larger geographical contexts of the archipelagos.

First, Shetland is the part of Britain which is geo-

graphically closest to Norway; as such it was a logi-

cal ﬁrst landfall for Norwegian Vikings who sailed

south to British and Irish locations. Thus, Shetland

and nearby Orkney were likely staging points for

Viking raids in the ninth and tenth centuries

A.D.,

when these attacks were most frequent.

Second, although some archaeological evidence

suggests that the islands were settled by people from

northern Norway, broader sources point to the west

coast of Norway as the home of most of the Viking

colonists. The Northern Isles have a gentle land-

scape compared with much of Norway’s mountain-

ous west coast, with relatively richer resources for

raising crops and herding domestic animals. How-

ever, like the west of Norway, the coastlines of the

islands are quite indented, providing residents easy

access from the shore to the deep sea. From a Nor-

wegian perspective, Orkney and Shetland would

have been desirable lands for practicing the familiar

mix of farming and maritime resource exploitation

found in most Viking settlement regions.

Third, although Orkney and Shetland are often

discussed together, reﬂecting their sometimes

shared political unity as a Norwegian, and eventual-

ly Scottish, earldom at various periods, the two ar-

chipelagos are geographically quite dissimilar in

many ways. Most of the ecological differences are

founded, literally, on bedrock. Orkney is underlain

largely by the Old Red Sandstone, which breaks

down into well-drained, fertile soil capable of sup-

porting productive and stable agriculture. In Shet-

land, however, the Old Red Sandstone occurs large-

ly in southern Mainland, and much of the rest of the

archipelago is blanketed with poorer soils that

formed on igneous and metamorphic substrates.

These soils have been improved in many places

through 5,000 years of cultivation, but in general,

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445

Fig. 1. Aerial view of the Jarlshof site, Dunrossness, Shetland. This long-settled site had an

extensive Viking and later Norse settlement, marked by straight walls on the left side of the

photograph. © CROWN COPYRIGHT. ROYAL COMMISSION ON THE ANCIENT AND HISTORICAL MONUMENTS OF

SCOTLAND (RCAHMS). REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Orkney has always been a better environment for

raising crops, while the Shetland landscape has fos-

tered more pastoral adaptations.

The archipelagos’ marine environments also

differ. Waters of the great North Atlantic current

system, which give the British Isles unusually warm

temperatures for their northern latitudes, mix with

the cooler and less saline North Sea around both

Orkney and Shetland. However, Shetland lies quite

close to the edge of the European Continental

Shelf, where the currents are strongest and where

upwelling of nutrient-rich water is greatest, while

Orkney is surrounded by relatively shallow waters.

The sum of these differences is that Shetland has a

more diverse and dynamic marine environment that

has always had the potential to compensate for the

region’s marginality for cereal agriculture.

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE

There is little straightforward textual evidence re-

garding the Norse settlement of Orkney and Shet-

land. Icelandic statesman and historian Snorri Stur-

luson’s Heimskringla states that the islands were

settled in the reign of the Norwegian king Harald

I Haarfager (Finehair) by Vikings wishing to escape

his growing political power, but the account was

written centuries later by an Icelander with contem-

porary concerns about Norwegian royal inﬂuence.

The Orkneyinga Saga, the only Icelandic saga that

was centered on the Northern Isles, contains little

information on the causes and processes of the early

7: EARLY MIDDLE AGES/MIGRATION PERIOD

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ANCIENT EUROPE

Norse settlement, and largely focuses on the politi-

cal history of the Orkney Earldom in the eleventh

and twelfth centuries. A scattering of other sources

touch on the islands’ Viking history in discussing

the activities of Orkney Earls outside the islands.

One such account is found in Njál’s Saga, which

concerns Earl Sigurd the Stout’s death in Ireland at

the battle of Clontarf in 1014. Written records of

life in the islands increased dramatically in number

and descriptive content in the later medieval and

early post-medieval centuries.

PLACE-NAMES

Place-names are a type of originally verbal evidence

that may preserve many cultural continuities from

the Viking Period. The place-names of Orkney and

Shetland are overwhelmingly Scandinavian in ori-

gin, demonstrating that the earlier Pictish language

was replaced, not blended, with Old Norse in the

decades after the landnám (ﬁrst land-taking). Early

place-names may include those incorporating the

words or elements “bu” (bú), “-bister” (bolstaðr),

and “skaill” (skáli), whereas the names of farms end-

ing with “-ster” (seter) and “-gard” or “-garth”

(garðr) may mark secondary establishments. Al-

though place-names are impossible to date precise-

ly, in some cases they may record changing land use.

For example, place-names incorporating the words

“pund” and “quoy” refer to livestock pens of vari-

ous types, pointing to grazing as an early land use.

In a more general way, the high density of place-

names testiﬁes to a very intensive exploitation of the

island landscapes: for example, it is estimated that

Shetland has over 50,000 Norse place-names dis-

tributed over a total land area of only 1,425 square

kilometers.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

When the Norse arrived both island groups were in-

habited by a Celtic population usually referred to by

archaeologists and historians as the Picts. Various

forms of archaeological evidence demonstrate

strong cultural ties between the Picts of Orkney and

Shetland and those of mainland Scotland. (Those

on the mainland were ﬁrst referred to as “Picts” by

the Romans in the third century

A.D.) Much re-

mains to be learned about the Northern Isles Picts,

but archaeological research conducted since the

1970s has shown that there must have been a con-

siderable population in the centuries just before the

Norse colonization. In this regard the Northern

Isles of Scotland differed dramatically from the

largely uninhabited places that the Vikings later col-

onized, including the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and

Greenland.

However, with the exception of scattered pre-

Norse place-names and perhaps some distinctive el-

ements in landholding organization, there are few

elements in the cultures of Norse Orkney and Shet-

land that seem to be holdovers from the Pictish past.

The lack of pre-Norse cultural traces in the Viking

period has led to speculation that the meeting of the

two peoples must have been violent, resulting in the

extermination of the Picts. Currently available ar-

chaeological evidence regarding this complex issue

remains ambiguous, and the nature of Pictish-Norse

interaction is still an enigma.

Indeed, the general scarcity of documents relat-

ing to local events in the Norse settlement period

makes archaeological evidence critically important.

Viking-period settlements and burials have been

uncovered, either accidentally or through formal

excavations since the 1800s, and much has been

learned about Norse life in Orkney and Shetland.

This brief discussion will outline only the largest

and most signiﬁcant sites and ﬁnds that have re-

vealed important information.

The earliest excavated Norse settlements in

Orkney include those at Buckquoy, the Brough of

Birsay, Pool, Westness, Skaill in Deerness, and Sae-

var Howe. In Shetland, the only excavated sites with

extensive demonstrated Viking period remains are

at Jarlshof and Old Scatness. At present, the only

relatively well-preserved buildings in Shetland that

were not reused Pictish constructions are at

Jarlshof. Norse occupation levels at all of these sites

were underlain by the remains of Pictish settle-

ments. Yet only at Buckquoy, and possibly Pool,

was there plausible evidence of continuities between

the Pictish and Norse occupations; others revealed

a possible hiatus in settlement before the Norse ar-

rival. Dating evidence for all of the sites varies in

quantity and quality. In general, these Viking settle-

ments seem to have begun in the later ninth centu-

ry, a considerable time after the onset of Viking

raids in southern Britain would have brought Nor-

wegians to the Northern Isles. Thus, on the one

hand, the long-term assumption that settlement

began with Viking raiding in the early ninth century

VIKING SETTLEMENTS IN ORKNEY AND SHETLAND

ANCIENT EUROPE

447

is not supported so far by the archaeological record.

On the other hand, further ﬁeld studies and analyses

may change this picture: the settlement evidence for

the Northern Isles

A.D. 800–1100 is still relatively

slight, especially in the Shetland Islands.

Burials also may provide much information

about Viking cultures, but this type of evidence is

much more common in Orkney than in Shetland.

Major cemeteries existed at Pierowall on Westray

and at Westness on Rousay. Apparently isolated

graves have also been found at other locations in

Orkney and in Shetland. Pagan Viking burial forms

in the Northern Isles included inhumations in long

and short rectangular, stone-lined trenches or cists,

ﬂexed burials in stone-lined, ovoid pits, and boat

burials that incorporated small, inshore vessels. The

variety of included grave goods matches those

found in other areas of the Viking World, and typi-

cal artifacts include weapons of various sorts and

equipment for making textiles. Shetland has far

fewer pre-Christian Norse graves than does Orkney,

and far fewer than have been found in Norway and

Iceland. This is a striking pattern that is difﬁcult to

explain: the conditions of preservation and the like-

lihood of discovering such sites would seem to be

the same on Shetland as in the other locations. The

acceptance of Christianity by the Norse would have

curtailed the equipping of burials with grave goods,

but there is no evidence that suggests that the Shet-

land Norse were Christianized earlier than those of

Orkney. Likewise, there is no evidence that Orkney

was settled earlier and would thus have had a longer

“pagan period,” with greater numbers of pagan

interments.

REGIONAL ECONOMY

When the regional archaeological evidence is inter-

preted with the aid of historical records of the

Northern Isles and Norway, and with ethnographic

information from later centuries, a picture emerges

of the ways in which the Norse settlers of Orkney

and Shetland provided themselves with food and

shelter. However, it is important to recognize that

relatively few sites from the 800–1100 era have been

thoroughly excavated with modern methods. Even

fewer sites contain both well-preserved architecture

and bioarchaeological evidence from associated

middens, or refuse deposits. Both types of evidence

are valuable for reconstructing human economies.

It is likely that current projects, such as the Old

Scatness Broch investigations in Shetland and the

Quoygrew excavations in Orkney, will produce this

type of complementary evidence. (Such sites are

more common in Iceland and Greenland, where en-

tire Viking period settlements were quickly aban-

doned, leaving better-preserved remains.) It is cur-

rently impossible to deﬁne a typical Viking period

settlement type for either Orkney or Shetland.

Some excavated settlements apparently supported

multiple households in separate but adjacent dwell-

ings, while other sites seem to represent single-

household farms. Over time, Orkney and Shetland

developed a more concentrated settlement pattern,

eventually forming loose clusters of farmsteads simi-

lar to what would later be termed townships, but it

is difﬁcult to specify the forms these settlement units

took in the period between 800 and 1100. Place-

name evidence and later settlement distributions

suggest that one key requirement for establishing an

early Norse farm was proximity to a shoreline where

boats could be landed.

Bioarchaeological and artifact evidence from

excavated sites indicates that the Viking-period

Norse of the Northern Isles relied on diverse

sources of food, including domestic livestock, cere-

als, and wild foods, including ﬁsh, seals, seabirds

and mollusks. Cattle and sheep were the most im-

portant mammals, but some pig bones have been

found on all sites. In contrast with Viking Norway

and Greenland, there is little evidence that goats

were ever important in Northern Isles’ economies.

Both the grains and the quern stones used to

process them have been recovered from Viking peri-

od sites, and they demonstrate that cereals were a

key resource in both Orkney and Shetland. Bere

(two-rowed barley—Hordeum vulgare) was the

most important crop, as in later centuries. Barley is

well suited to cultivation in the archipelagos be-

cause it is salt-tolerant, and much sea spray is depos-

ited on the islands, especially in Shetland.

The role of marine ﬁsh in Viking and later medi-

eval Orkney and Shetland economies is currently

under intensive investigation. Some types of bioar-

chaeological evidence suggest that ﬁsh may have

played an important role in Northern Isles econo-

mies of the Viking period. But given the limitations

of the available evidence it is difﬁcult to sort out the

dietary contributions of all of the various categories

7: EARLY MIDDLE AGES/MIGRATION PERIOD

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of marine foods, which also included sea mammals,

birds, and mollusks. Also, the environmental con-

trasts between Orkney and Shetland suggest that

the relative importance of marine and terrestrial re-

sources may have differed between the two island

groups. Much more archaeological research will be

required before this complex issue is resolved, and

in the meantime it is probably unwise to generalize

about Orkney and Shetland as a single settlement

region. Certainly, by the end of the medieval peri-

od, ﬁshing for food and for trade was much more

important in Shetland than it was in Orkney. In

general, it is likely that as more sites are investigated,

especially early settlements, Viking Orkney and

Shetland will emerge as areas with distinct cultural

patterns. These traits were probably fostered by eco-

logical diversity and the lack of later integrating

forces such as the medieval church, strong king-

doms, and large, structured market systems.

See also Picts (vol. 2, part 7); Viking Settlements in

Iceland and Greenland (vol. 2, part 7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ballantyne, John H., and Brian Smith, eds. Shetland Docu-

ments, 1195–1579. Lerwick, U.K.: Shetland Islands

Council and Shetland Times, 1999.

Barrett, James H., Rebecca A. Nicholson, and Ruby Cerrón-

Carrasco. “Archaeo-ichthyological Evidence for Long-

term Socioeconomic Trends in Northern Scotland:

3500

B.C. to A.D. 1500.” Journal of Archaeological Sci-

ence 26 (April 1999): 353–388.

Batey, Colleen E., and John Sheehan. “Viking Expansion

and Cultural Blending in Britain and Ireland.” In Vi-

kings: The North Atlantic Saga. Edited by William W.

Fitzhugh and Elizabeth I. Ward, pp. 127–141. Wash-

ington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Bigelow, Gerald F. “Issues and Prospects in Shetland Norse

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sistence in the North Atlantic. Edited by Christopher D.

Morris and D. James Rackham, pp. 9–32. Glasgow,

Scotland: University of Glasgow, 1992.

———. “Sandwick, Unst, and Late Norse Shetland Econo-

my.” In Shetland Archaeology: New Work in Shetland in

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U.K.: Shetland Times, 1985.

Bond, Julie M. “Beyond the Fringe? Recognising Change

and Adaptation in Pictish and Norse Orkney.” In Life

on the Edge: Human Settlement and Marginality. Ed-

ited by C. M. Mills and G. Coles, pp. 81–90. Oxford:

Oxbow Books, 1998.

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vations by Peter Gelling of the Prehistoric, Pictish, Viking,

and Later Periods, 1963–1981. Oxford: Archaeopress,

1997.

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U.K.: Leicester University Press, 1987.

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ERALD F. BIGELOW

VIKING SETTLEMENTS IN ORKNEY AND SHETLAND

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EARLY CHRISTIAN IRELAND

■

FOLLOWED BY FEATURE ESSAY ON:

Clonmacnoise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 456

■

Along with all other periods of Irish archaeology,

the Early Christian period has been the focus of a

great expansion in the level of research since the

early 1980s. One of the main trends in contempo-

rary studies has been the increasing secularization of

the archaeology related to this period. Increasingly,

the academic community is realizing that the

monasteries and other religious settlements did not

dominate the early medieval Irish landscape, al-

though undoubtedly they were an important com-

ponent of that landscape. The use of the term

“Early Christian” to describe this period is now in-

creasingly being seen as overemphasizing the role of

the ecclesiastical sites at the expense of the many

other settlement types of the era that had no reli-

gious connection. As a result, archaeologists now

tend to use the terms “Early Historic” or, increas-

ingly, “Early Medieval” to describe this period.

Generally speaking, the period is thought by

most scholars to begin in the ﬁfth century

A.D., soon

after the coming of Christianity to the island. It

ends in the twelfth century with the arrival of the

Continental religious orders that broadly over-

lapped with the coming of the Anglo-Normans in

1169 and 1170. Although Ireland was not part of

the Roman Empire, it was intimately involved in the

empire’s trading connections with Roman Britain

and beyond. Thus, it is difﬁcult to be sure when ex-

actly the inﬂuence of the Roman Iron Age declines

and the Early Medieval period, as such, commences.

For instance, archaeologist Nancy Edwards has

posed fundamental questions about the origins of

this period of Irish history that debate the extent to

which the impact of Roman culture and the intro-

duction of literacy and the Christian religion initiat-

ed the changes that took place.

CHURCH ARCHAEOLOGY

The church in this period was primarily monastic,

and the monastic sites that still survive as ruins in

many parts of the island can be seen as a signiﬁcant

reminder of this important phase of Ireland’s past.

Very little survives archaeologically of the earliest

monasteries because their buildings were of wood

or wattle-and-mud construction. But it can be ar-

gued that some of the small monastic communities

established in the western fringes of the country,

where stone has always been the principal building

material, can give us a good idea of the original ap-

pearance of the early monasteries built elsewhere.

These include the impressively sited, beehive-

shaped dry-stone cells on the island of Skellig Mi-

chael, situated in the Atlantic 13 kilometers west of

the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry. Others are

found on the island of Inishmurray in County Sligo.

The most famous monastic sites, such as Clonmac-

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