Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Deep Coring, Viking Age Accumulation Rates And Household Wealth In Skagafjörður, Northern Iceland, Eric D. Johnson

Graduate Masters Theses

Discerning and explaining social and economic differences is a fundamental task of archaeology, but a fine-tuned measure of household wealth is often obfuscated by the inability to account for time or demographics in the archaeological record. This project tests the ways that Iceland, settled by Norse populations between A.D. 870 and 930, provides a temporally-sensitive mode of measuring household income through average rates of deposition of architectural material and fuel refuse while also providing a context for studying the emergence of inequality in a previously uninhabited landscape. In 2014, a deep-coring survey of 11 occupational sites was conducted in the …