With the arrival of Heather and Sue, the coring team has morphed into the pollen team!  For the last week we’ve been coring at Meðalheimur, finding locations with good tephra sequences.  So far we’ve finished taking samples from four 1×1 units at different locations around the farm – we have one more to finish up tomorrow before we move on to Reynistaður.   Despite the cold, strong wind, and rain, we’re making excellent progress!  When we get back to Boston, we’ll take the samples to the lab and count the pollen grains preserved at each level.

For the last few days we’ve been working close to the midden team, who are opening a large section in the side of the farm mound.  It’s been fun to hang out with them!  They’ve found lots of bones, plus some wool and a copper pot dating to sometime after 1300.

I’ll have some pictures to post later this week of the pollen team’s exploits!

This morning the whole SASS team visited some other exavations around the valley – the harbor at Kolkuós and an early cemetery on the other side of the fjord.  It was great to see what other groups are excavating, and helpful to get some perspective on our own sites.  We’re looking forward to seeing the Kolkuós folks at Seyla soon!

The weather at Seyla today was miserable, it was cold and windy with intermittent rain and yes – hail! The crew attempted to work through the rough weather but it was apparent by noon that it would not be possible. However, there are still updates from Seyla, particularly concerning the cow barn.

In the west room of the cow barn, the crew has successfully excavated down to the floor.

In the east room of the cow barn, the crew is continuing to excavate the room and yesterday they hit upon a well preserved dog skull. The picture below shows the dog skull on the left and a sheep’s jaw on the right. 

And below is a close up of the dog skull.

This week at Seyla, we have continued to follow and define walls. Some of us have started excavating what we believe is a medieval cow barn.

In the area where we believe the hay was kept, we have found traces of hay and some sheep, horse, and dog bones. Pictured below is a well preserved and large leg bone (possibly horse or cow) that was found today.

Below is the area where we believe the cows were kept. It is a small room which had space to hold two to three cows. In this room, we have found some animal bones and even some wood fragments in the southwest corner.

In other areas of Seyla, the crew has been successful at exposing the turf walls of several Viking Age buildings.

Emily and Rita have been digging 1×1-meter test pits in farm mounds all over Skagafjorður, looking for midden dating from about 1000 AD or earlier.  They finished the pit at Kjartansstaðir today!  Here’s Emily waving from inside the farm mound, as Rita and Joanna look on:

At Seyla, we have continued looking for the boundaries of the cow barn and the walls of the skali (longhouse). We have been troweling through deposits of collapsed turf and tephra (ash from a volcanic eruption) and have occasionally come across animal bones. Mike Way and Kate Johnson have been excavating a peat ash and burn deposit.

As mentioned in the previous post, an area of Seyla was deturfed and imaged using GPR. Below is a picture of Mike, Marisa, and Brian using the machine to conduct GPR.

Today we had a backhoe to the site to uncover an adjacent 10 m swath so that Brian could run the GRP over it.  He had picked up the signature of half of a building and wanted to expand to see the whole building, possibly an early church.  Here’s a site overview with the newly exposed area at the right.

The coring team has been hard at work for the past few days!  We finished taking soil cores all over Pafastaðir, and today we began work on a farm mound at Kjartansstaðir.  We’ve been tiptoeing through the þufurs and wrestling with extreme dandelions.  On Monday we took a hike through field, bog, and stream to take a look at the tephra sequence on the abandoned farm at Melkot.

After a week I’m really starting to get hang of intepreting soil cores!

Fording a stream at Melkot

Beautiful tephra sequence at Melkot

John really gets into tephra.

 While some folks are working on buildings and features that had been identified in previous seasons at Seyla, a few of us have been chasing out new turf walls.  For three days we’ve been following a long (15 meters) turf wall, either of a longhouse or some sort of enclosure.  We are just now starting to clarify what is happening at one end , but it’s still puzzling.  Meanwhile, at the end of the day today we uncovered more (possibly unrelated) bits of wall in the area we’ve been clearing, running in different directions.  All the walls and the fallen turf around them are covered by the bright white tephra of an 1104 eruption.  More updates if and when we figure out what these walls are doing.

Also at Seyla, Kate and Mike have been excavating a large fire-related pit that has produced a few interesting artifacts, a lot of bone, and some slag.

CMB
 

An exciting and amazing composite photo of the site Stora Seyla has been created using a program called Microsoft Photosynth (http://photosynth.net/).

111 photographs of Stora Seyla that were taken on July 1 and July 2 using the kite and pole were stitched together to create a composite photo called a "synth." You can view the synth of Stora Seyla here.

After clicking the link and downloading SilverLight, you can scroll over the synth and click on any area within a white outline to zoom in on a specific photo.

LWN

Here are some of the aerial photos from Seyla.  The first two were taken with a camera on a pole on July 2: 

Kate and Laura working, while Pete holds the pole.

Kate looks up as Kelly wanders through.

This is a test image from the kite on July 1.  At the top are the group flying the kite and and the GPR team, people clearing the site in the middle, and at the bottom you can see the stone lines of the building we’re excavating.

Last night after our Fourth of July dinner (hot dogs, hamburgers, and french fries – it was delicious) we took a group photo:

The 2009 SASS team in Iceland.