through the 2005 grant proposal to the EM-31’s output: a map of Stora Seyla from the surface to six feet down, color-coded by how well the soil conducted electricity. “If you fuzz your eyes,” he told me, “you see a tract of light blue and dark blue. We imagine this is the limits of a structure.” It was 115 feet long. Based on this map, John’s team dug test trenches. They found a turf wall, a floor, hay, and a burned birch-bark roof, perfectly preserved—and older than 1104. The main house at Stora Seyla had also moved.
John was, he admitted, a little too pleased with their results. “I was pretty arrogant,” he said with a rueful smile. “I essentially attacked the Icelanders for being incompetent.”
But if this technique—soil coring on a grid combined with the EM-31—worked so well, I asked, why was he bringing a new remote-sensing device—the untested ground-penetrating radar or GPR—to Skagafjord in 2005?
“Because I’m
not
an Icelandic archaeologist,” he said. “I don’t want to spend years excavating these sites. I have a few basic questions. How big is the farm? How much hay did they store? I want a shortcut to digging. GPR is the best remote-sensing technique available to archaeologists. What we need it for is to
not have to excavate.
“Now we can
find
sites with the other technique, but we can’t tell what were looking at without digging into them. And we keep chewing into the wrong places. This pisses off the Icelanders no end. It’s hard to convince them I’m even sort of competent. I don’t know which wall is which. I can’t answer all this ambiguity in the remote-sensing data. We’ve learned that the biggest anomaly is usually a corner, but we’ve learned that only by chewing into it—and we just about destroyed that corner of the house.”
“You mean Gudrid’s house?”
“The house at Glaumbaer. But it had to be done. There was no other way. We had to calibrate our readings.”
“You destroyed the corner of
Gudrid’s house?”
He looked uncomfortable. “I think the case for saying the longhouse at Glaumbaer is the referent for the story in the sagas is true,” he said. “Whether the
story
is true is another question.”
On a warm winter day in March 2005, we were in Iceland, on the site of the storied house, and John was looking even more uncomfortable.
“Why do you think you can use a backhoe here?” Sigridur Sigurdardottir, known as “Sirri,” rolled a heavy glass paperweight between her broad hands. She had served us tea and coffee when we arrived at her office at the Skagafjord Folk Museum, and had even unwrapped a box of chocolates; but now she was installed behind her desk, taking on the full authority of the book-lined office with its unsettling touches of practicality: refrigerator, microwave, spinning wheel. Her gaze was firm and unapologetic.
“He has already hired one,” Gudny Zoega told Sirri in Icelandic.
John backtracked in his ninety-second introduction to his archaeological protocol, vainly trying to rephrase his argument. With the backhoe he intended to quickly strip the top layer of turf off the hayfield. Using trowels and shovels, his archaeologists (and unskilled volunteers, like me) would then expose the tops of the buried longhouse walls to check if the remote-sensing devices had drawn the floor plan accurately. That would be it for the 2005 field season. John was in northern Iceland now to work out where his crew of fifteen would eat and sleep, where they could have lab space, whether he could get a free car for five weeks in July and August. He had been in the country only one day and had spent much of that time searching out a certain kind of Danish backhoe that he thought was excellent for archaeology. The previous afternoon, he had found just what he wanted. Though the owner spoke no English, and John no Icelandic, they hit it off right away. “He keeps his backhoe inside, he likes it so much,” John had crowed to
John was, he admitted, a little too pleased with their results. “I was pretty arrogant,” he said with a rueful smile. “I essentially attacked the Icelanders for being incompetent.”
But if this technique—soil coring on a grid combined with the EM-31—worked so well, I asked, why was he bringing a new remote-sensing device—the untested ground-penetrating radar or GPR—to Skagafjord in 2005?
“Because I’m
not
an Icelandic archaeologist,” he said. “I don’t want to spend years excavating these sites. I have a few basic questions. How big is the farm? How much hay did they store? I want a shortcut to digging. GPR is the best remote-sensing technique available to archaeologists. What we need it for is to
not have to excavate.
“Now we can
find
sites with the other technique, but we can’t tell what were looking at without digging into them. And we keep chewing into the wrong places. This pisses off the Icelanders no end. It’s hard to convince them I’m even sort of competent. I don’t know which wall is which. I can’t answer all this ambiguity in the remote-sensing data. We’ve learned that the biggest anomaly is usually a corner, but we’ve learned that only by chewing into it—and we just about destroyed that corner of the house.”
“You mean Gudrid’s house?”
“The house at Glaumbaer. But it had to be done. There was no other way. We had to calibrate our readings.”
“You destroyed the corner of
Gudrid’s house?”
He looked uncomfortable. “I think the case for saying the longhouse at Glaumbaer is the referent for the story in the sagas is true,” he said. “Whether the
story
is true is another question.”
On a warm winter day in March 2005, we were in Iceland, on the site of the storied house, and John was looking even more uncomfortable.
“Why do you think you can use a backhoe here?” Sigridur Sigurdardottir, known as “Sirri,” rolled a heavy glass paperweight between her broad hands. She had served us tea and coffee when we arrived at her office at the Skagafjord Folk Museum, and had even unwrapped a box of chocolates; but now she was installed behind her desk, taking on the full authority of the book-lined office with its unsettling touches of practicality: refrigerator, microwave, spinning wheel. Her gaze was firm and unapologetic.
“He has already hired one,” Gudny Zoega told Sirri in Icelandic.
John backtracked in his ninety-second introduction to his archaeological protocol, vainly trying to rephrase his argument. With the backhoe he intended to quickly strip the top layer of turf off the hayfield. Using trowels and shovels, his archaeologists (and unskilled volunteers, like me) would then expose the tops of the buried longhouse walls to check if the remote-sensing devices had drawn the floor plan accurately. That would be it for the 2005 field season. John was in northern Iceland now to work out where his crew of fifteen would eat and sleep, where they could have lab space, whether he could get a free car for five weeks in July and August. He had been in the country only one day and had spent much of that time searching out a certain kind of Danish backhoe that he thought was excellent for archaeology. The previous afternoon, he had found just what he wanted. Though the owner spoke no English, and John no Icelandic, they hit it off right away. “He keeps his backhoe inside, he likes it so much,” John had crowed to
Similar Books
