What does Landnám look like? Excavations at Swandro and Old Scatness
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2023
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2023
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Abstract
Research at two multi-period settlement mounds, Old Scatness (Shetland; Dockrill et al. 2010) and Swandro (Rousay, Orkney; ongoing, Bond and Dockrill 2016), suggests that many first-generation Scandinavian settlements occur at pre-existing Pictish settlements and associated landscapes. Both sites have settlement biographies that provide evidence for long sequences spanning the Early Iron Age to the Norse period, including evidence for landnám, or first settlement. Settlement on existing Pictish ‘estates’ (high-status settlements with associated agricultural land, often originating in the Iron Age or earlier) would provide access to both maritime and agricultural resources, and it is suggested that ‘estate taking’ may have been a means of procuring key locations. The term landnám is used in several ways in archaeology; Cleasby in his Icelandic–English dictionary defined it as ‘taking possession of land as settler, settlement’ (Cleasby and Vigfússon 1874), while Danish palynologist Iversen used it in the 1940s to describe features in pol-len diagrams which he thought indicated clearance of the landscape by incoming Neolithic farmers, and it is still used in this sense (Iversen 1941). In North Atlantic archaeology it is often used in the context of settlement of a presumed empty landscape by the Norse in Iceland or the Faroe Islands. Here we use it in preference to the more loaded term ‘colonisation’ to indicate initial Norse settlement.
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Dockrill S and Bond J (2023) What does Landnám look like? Excavations at Swandro and Old Scatness. In: Horne T, Pierce E and Barrowman R (Eds.) The Viking Age in Scotland: Studies in Scottish Scandinavian Archaeology. Edinburgh University Press.
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