The aim of this chapter is to test and validate the pattern of settlements and their economic activities presented in the previous chapter through geoarchaeology and zooarchaeology data recovered in Iceland and the Faeroes.

The writer conducted soil sampling in three Icelandic sites and two Faeroes sites; the zooarchaeological reports were prepared at Hunter College. This chapter compares the results from soil micromorphology and bone analyses; they are presented as case studies. The interpretation and integration of the latter in the present chapter, however, belongs to the present author.

Geo-archaeology: Understanding Human Economic History through the Use of Landscape

Geo-archaeology has a wide range of applications for the understanding of past economic history. It enables reconstruction of past landscape and environments as well as occupation of discrete spatial areas by humans. Within geo-archaeology, micromorphology has become increasingly important for the understanding of site formation.

Identifying Settlement Patterns

Settlement patterning and differentiation between centre and periphery is a key factor in understanding economic behaviour. The concept of centre and periphery was developed as a theoretical framework through which to analyse medieval socio-economic exchanges. At the centre of that theory the manor plays the key role in organising the economy – quite literally so in medieval rural landscapes. The manorial system founds its origin in the ‘manse’ and dates from the seventh century. It was a family unit cultivating the land. It comprised the family house, storage buildings and the land. The tool used to plough the soils, usually between five and thirty hectares, defined the size of the manse. The growth of population during the ninth and tenth centuries required more cultivated lands and many ‘manses’ disappeared. By the eleventh century, a new economic unit, the manor, emerged. Overall, a manor was a unit estate administered by a lord who exercised rights of jurisdiction in his private court. It retains the farming characteristics of the ‘manse’, such as crop cultivations, rearing of livestock, granary, production of flour and all agricultural related activities.

Useful for Europe and Scandinavia, and while it seems that no nobility per se developed in medieval Iceland, it remains that such is observed in Iceland, as it was based on the lord-socio-economic relationships.