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, … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

 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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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.   … Continue reading →

 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 … Continue reading →

Greetings from Iceland! My name is Laura Ng, I am an incoming graduate student at UMass Boston and I will aso be writing some of the blog entries. Please bare with us while we continue to add to and update this … Continue reading →

Hi!  I’m Katy, an incoming graduate student at UMass Boston.  I’ll be writing some blog posts while we’re in Iceland this summer! Today we were at Stóra-Seyla, a Viking-era farmstead a few miles outside of Sauðárkrókur.  SASS has worked it … Continue reading →