Skagafjörður Church and Settlement Survey

SCASS Blog

Church in Tephra: part two – the Drone Video

| 0 comments

Drone video over Keflavík church and burial ground that is outlined in the 1104 AD volcanic ash layer from Mt. Hekla.

Drone video over Keflavík church and burial ground that is outlined in the 1104 AD volcanic ash layer from Mt. Hekla.

There is now a wonderful video from Guðný’s resent drone flight over the Keflavík church and burial ground that SCASS is excavating.  When the white ash layer that exploded from Mount Hekla in 1104 AD fell back to earth it landed all over.  Because the square turf church (with a small apse in the east) and the round turf wall that encloses the graveyard were above the surface and later removed, there is no white ash teprha in those locations.  The church and churchyard wall have been outlined in the 1104 AD volcanic ash layer from Mt. Hekla. If you look closely, you can see that some of the graves are from after the white tephra fell. That is, they were excavated through the tephra.  Once the tephra layer is removed, we will also begin to see the graves that were dug before the layer fell.

There are two holes in the site, a trench in the center-east from the electric company and a round hole in the north east from an old cesspool.  Looks like the cesspool did not disturb any graves.

 

Author: John Steinberg

Dr. John Steinberg has been a Research Scientist at the Fiske Center since 2006. He received his PhD in Anthropology from UCLA in 1997. Before coming to UMass Boston, John taught at UCLA and California State University Northridge. He is interested in the economic problems of colonization, both in New England and across the North Atlantic. He uses GIS and shallow geophysics to study settlement patterns to understand broad trends over the landscape. In addition to John's New England work, he has been studying the settlement patterns of Viking Age Iceland. John is the director of the Digital Archaeology Laboratory at the Fiske Center.

Leave a Reply

Required fields are marked *.


Skip to toolbar