turf house—we were flying high!”
The buried turf wall was in the hayfield behind the Skagafjord Folk Museum at Glaumbaer, a collection of historic houses on a busy road that runs the length of the valley to the town of Saudarkrokur, population 2,600. Beside the road is a stone statue of a stout-armed woman balancing a tiny boy on her shoulder—Gudrid and Snorri, the first residents—but the museum was not established to honor them alone. On a low mound, beside a trim white church that is still active, is a rambling turf farmhouse, its walls and roofs of sod forming a jumble of lumps much like a collection of hobbit holes connected by tunnels. Its wooden gables and doors are painted mustard yellow. A house has been on this site, the history books say, since saga times, a thousand years ago. The current structure, begun in 1750, was lived in continuously until it passed to the museum in 1948.
Two other historical buildings were moved onto the museum grounds in the 1990s. One houses a coffee shop and galleries. It had been built in 1886 to be a girls’ school (though “this never came to pass,” a museum brochure relates). The other building, a little white wood-framed house with a green grass roof, provides office space for the museum staff. Its claim to fame is its track record: The house had been dismantled and moved six times since it was built in 1862, logging over 120 miles by ice, sea, and road. Arriving at Glaumbaer in 1996, it was very nearly placed on top of the turf wall yet to be discovered beneath the hayfield.
That wall, John found, was topped by the shiny white tephra from the eruption of Mount Hekla in 1104. Curious, John angled a soil corer into the mound on which the 1750s turf house sits, right in front of the mustard-yellow kitchen door, where the family would have thrown their fireplace ash and scraps. “That ash sits exactly on the 1104 tephra layer, and under that is sterile soil,” he said. “For the house we found down below in the hayfield, everything is
under
the 1104. So the main house at Glaumbaer moved about 1104.”
John’s Icelandic colleagues, including museum curator Sigridur Sigurdardottir and archaeologists Gudny Zoega and her supervisor at the time, Ragnheidur Traustadottir, were skeptical. They asked Gudmundur Olafsson to come up from the Icelandic National Museum in Reykjavik to take a look. Gudmundur, who has excavated more Viking Age longhouses than anyone else, spent several days on the site, dug a long trench, and was also not convinced.
No one doubted that John had found something made of turf and older than 1104. But was it a longhouse? None of the histories, censuses, or tax records showed a house there. And even if a longhouse
did
exist in the Glaumbaer hayfield, another line of reasoning went, it was just an oddity. In general, both history and archaeology agreed, turf houses didn’t move. When fashions changed, the new house was simply built on top of the remains of the old. John argued, on the other hand, that if there was one invisible Viking house in the valley, there might be many.
The Icelanders suggested they take another farm—one not mentioned in the sagas—and survey it using both methods. John chose the farm of Stora Seyla (“Big Marsh”), about three miles south of Glaumbaer. Its turf house had stood until the 1920s atop a complicated mound cut through by a stream, and the nearby fields had not been bulldozed flat or plowed. With the historical records in hand, the Icelandic archaeologists marked every feature on the landscape that looked man-made. John’s team tested each by taking soil cores: According to the tephra lines, none of the features was older than 1104. “So then we cored the whole place on a 50-meter grid,” John told me, “past the modern boundaries of the farm Stora Seyla until we hit the fjord. One core came up with charcoal, and an adjacent one had some very deep soil.” They tested that area with the EM-31.
John paged
The buried turf wall was in the hayfield behind the Skagafjord Folk Museum at Glaumbaer, a collection of historic houses on a busy road that runs the length of the valley to the town of Saudarkrokur, population 2,600. Beside the road is a stone statue of a stout-armed woman balancing a tiny boy on her shoulder—Gudrid and Snorri, the first residents—but the museum was not established to honor them alone. On a low mound, beside a trim white church that is still active, is a rambling turf farmhouse, its walls and roofs of sod forming a jumble of lumps much like a collection of hobbit holes connected by tunnels. Its wooden gables and doors are painted mustard yellow. A house has been on this site, the history books say, since saga times, a thousand years ago. The current structure, begun in 1750, was lived in continuously until it passed to the museum in 1948.
Two other historical buildings were moved onto the museum grounds in the 1990s. One houses a coffee shop and galleries. It had been built in 1886 to be a girls’ school (though “this never came to pass,” a museum brochure relates). The other building, a little white wood-framed house with a green grass roof, provides office space for the museum staff. Its claim to fame is its track record: The house had been dismantled and moved six times since it was built in 1862, logging over 120 miles by ice, sea, and road. Arriving at Glaumbaer in 1996, it was very nearly placed on top of the turf wall yet to be discovered beneath the hayfield.
That wall, John found, was topped by the shiny white tephra from the eruption of Mount Hekla in 1104. Curious, John angled a soil corer into the mound on which the 1750s turf house sits, right in front of the mustard-yellow kitchen door, where the family would have thrown their fireplace ash and scraps. “That ash sits exactly on the 1104 tephra layer, and under that is sterile soil,” he said. “For the house we found down below in the hayfield, everything is
under
the 1104. So the main house at Glaumbaer moved about 1104.”
John’s Icelandic colleagues, including museum curator Sigridur Sigurdardottir and archaeologists Gudny Zoega and her supervisor at the time, Ragnheidur Traustadottir, were skeptical. They asked Gudmundur Olafsson to come up from the Icelandic National Museum in Reykjavik to take a look. Gudmundur, who has excavated more Viking Age longhouses than anyone else, spent several days on the site, dug a long trench, and was also not convinced.
No one doubted that John had found something made of turf and older than 1104. But was it a longhouse? None of the histories, censuses, or tax records showed a house there. And even if a longhouse
did
exist in the Glaumbaer hayfield, another line of reasoning went, it was just an oddity. In general, both history and archaeology agreed, turf houses didn’t move. When fashions changed, the new house was simply built on top of the remains of the old. John argued, on the other hand, that if there was one invisible Viking house in the valley, there might be many.
The Icelanders suggested they take another farm—one not mentioned in the sagas—and survey it using both methods. John chose the farm of Stora Seyla (“Big Marsh”), about three miles south of Glaumbaer. Its turf house had stood until the 1920s atop a complicated mound cut through by a stream, and the nearby fields had not been bulldozed flat or plowed. With the historical records in hand, the Icelandic archaeologists marked every feature on the landscape that looked man-made. John’s team tested each by taking soil cores: According to the tephra lines, none of the features was older than 1104. “So then we cored the whole place on a 50-meter grid,” John told me, “past the modern boundaries of the farm Stora Seyla until we hit the fjord. One core came up with charcoal, and an adjacent one had some very deep soil.” They tested that area with the EM-31.
John paged
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