Sustainability and the Domestication of Inequality: Archaeology of Long-Term Human-Environment Interactions in Hegranes, North Iceland

Catlin, Kathryn A

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-94pe-5y79

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Sustainability and the Domestication of Inequality: Archaeology of Long-Term Human-Environment Interactions in Hegranes, North Iceland

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This dissertation investigates long-term biographies of seventeen small medieval settlements in the region of Hegranes, Skagafjörður, North Iceland, placing their creation, development, and reuse in the context of coupled social and environmental change. The individuals and households who lived at the Hegranes sites were at the nexus of both kinds of change in Iceland prior to the 12th century. The practices and activities carried out at the sites had significant, long-term impacts on the landscape, which affected socio-ecological relationships in Iceland over the course of a millennium. To investigate these places, I developed a protocol to locate the smallest medieval sites with domestic occupation in Iceland. An innovative program of closely spaced, systematic soil coring was coupled with test excavations at sites with ruined early modern livestock buildings. Midden deposits dating to the 9th-11th centuries were located at the majority of sites surveyed, and almost all of them were deserted by 1104 CE. The survey revealed that medieval domestic sites in Iceland fall along an uninterrupted continuum from very small, short-term camps to long-term, large, multi-generational farmsteads. This discovery has broad and substantial theoretical implications for our understanding of the settlement of Iceland and the development of social stratification, including the relationship of social inequality to ecological degradation. The settlement of Iceland by Norse farmers in the late 9th century set off cascading environmental changes, primarily deforestation and erosion that resulted from land clearance and grazing livestock. These activities caused significant environmental degradation. Nonetheless, the landscape created by the first Icelanders was more effective at supporting livestock and hay agriculture than the pre-settlement woodland ecology. Landscape changes occurred concurrently with social and economic change, as the political economy was transforming from one based primarily on household subsistence, towards tenancy and rent extraction. The combination of economic and environmental change resulted in a productive landscape that was sustained over the course of a millennium. Sustainability was intertwined with increased social inequality, providing more opportunities for wealth among already prosperous farmers while decreasing the choices available to those at the lower end of the social scale. The environmental context of the sites was investigated via extensive soil coring to describe changes in sediment accumulation, along with loss-on-ignition in nearby mires to characterize wetland development. Hegranes experienced two major erosion episodes. The first, prior to the 12th century, corresponds to the impact of settlement, while the second, through the 19th century, corresponds to increases in sheep farming that accompanied Iceland's entry into the international marketplace. Wetland health mirrors trends in the erosion rate. Primary activities at the sites during habitation included landscape clearance, livestock tending, charcoal production, peat mining, and hunting and processing marine animals. These marginal sites probably were not autonomous farms, but may have been sub-settlements of other farms, charged with creating pasture, defending land claims, and acquiring and processing certain resources. The sites transitioned from permanent habitation to sporadic use for livestock during the social and economic transformations that occurred during the 11th century. The end of permanent habitation at the sites signals changes in the acquisition, distribution, and use of resources, along with changes in the organization and control of the landscape. Social inequality increased and lower-status individuals lost a degree of autonomy, as they were relocated to tenant farms or to service positions in wealthier households where they would have been subject to greater oversight and control over their activities. The marginal sites were repurposed as agricultural outbuildings, taking advantage of prior labor expended at the sites. New infrastructure such as field walls helped preserve the soil for serve future generations of farmers and livestock. A long-term perspective on agricultural management shows how practices were naturalized and mediated by their own infrastructure, making them sustainable, but also vulnerable to unforeseen effects of larger scale intensification through the 19th century. These insights have important implications for responses to modern climate change.

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