SASS – UMass Boston – Fiske Center – Archaeology

Blog of the Skagafjordur Archaeological Settlement Survey

Coring, Cows, and Kites

| 0 comments

 For the last three days a group of us has been out taking soil cores at Jaðar and Pafastaðir, a small farm and a large farm north of Stora Seyla.  Here’s John checking out a core at Jaðar:

I’ve mostly been out with the GPS, making sure that we accurately record the locations of all cores so we can analyze them later with GIS software:

At Jaðar, we made friends with a wonderful little boy and his dog.  We took about a hundred core samples, and found, by sheer luck, the smallest midden ever.  Check out this profile:

And at Pafastaðir, just to round things out, we found the largest midden ever!  Today we did a lot of coring in the fields at Pafastaðir, among the þufurs – and in the cow pasture:

Orange flag, or delicious new flower?

Over at Seyla, there have been a few artifact finds (which I’ll let someone talk about who’s actually been working there), the site has been completely recorded with ground-penetrating radar, and they’ve been trying out some kite arial photography:

Author: Kathryn Catlin

Kathryn Catlin is an alumna of UMass Boston's Historical Archaeology MA program and a current PhD student in Anthropology at Northwestern University. Kathryn's research interests include the social and economic dimensions of settlement and colonization in Iceland, medieval England, and the colonial US. She is interested in developing survey techniques, including geophysical survey as well as more traditional archaeological methods, to describe relationships between the development of social inequality and the causes and consequences of environmental change. She has participated in numerous Fiske Center projects, including seasons in Iceland, Greenland, the Caribbean, and across New England.

Leave a Reply

Required fields are marked *.


Skip to toolbar