Walrus-tusk ivory and walrus-hide rope were highly desired goods in Viking Age northwest Europe. New finds of walrus bone and ivory in early Viking Age contexts in Iceland are concentrated in the southwest , and suggest extensive exploitation of nearby walrus for meat, hide and ivory during the first century of settlement. In Greenland, archaeofauna suggest a very different specialized long-distance hunting of the much larger walrus populations in the Disko Bay area that brought mainly ivory to the settlement areas and eventually to European markets. New lead isotopic analysis of archaeological walrus ivory and bone from Greenland and Iceland offers a tool for identifying possible source regions of walrus ivory during the early Middle Ages. This opens possibilities for assessing the development and relative importance of hunting grounds from the point of view of exported products.

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This paper assesses the contribution of historical and traditional winter grazing to long-term land degradation in northeast Iceland. To do so, indicators of soil erosion from two contrasting historical winter grazing areas, set in a tephrochronological framework, are compared against their temporal and regional land degradation contexts. The observations made indicate distinctive and different landscape responses to historical winter grazing depending on location. In both study areas, there is an accelerated level of wind and water erosion with settlement at ca. A.D. 874 through to A.D. 1477. One of these areas had a subsequent reduction in erosion rates to considerably below the regional average, possibly as a result of adaptive land management; the second, more inherently sensitive area, is now subarctic desert. These findings confirm early land management practices as a major factor in Icelandic land degradation, they contribute to explanations of early settlement success and failure, and highlight the significance of historical approaches in addressing contemporary issues of land degradation and conservation responses. ᭧

The dating of the settlement of Iceland has been debated for many years. According to written sources (sagas) from the early 12th century, the first Norwegian settlers arrived in Iceland in AD 874. However, some 14C dates from the earliest archaeological sites in Iceland, invariably from samples of birch and other indigenous wood species, have yielded surprisingly old ages, older by 100–150 yr than the historical date, suggesting that the settlement took place in the 7th or 8th century. In this paper, we report 16 new 14C dates of pairs of barley grain and wood samples from an excavation in Reykjavík in 2001. The new results show that the wood samples tend to be older than the grain samples by up to about 100 yr. We argue that the barley grains give the true date (AD 890), whereas the wood dates are too old. The grain dates are in close agreement with the settlement year quoted in the written sources. In particular, our new data eliminate the need of any of the ad hoc theories introduced up to now to explain the suspiciously high 14C ages of wood samples from the settlement of Iceland, namely, 1) the island effect, 2) the volcanic or geothermal effect, or 3) that settlement actually took place significantly before the time recorded in the sagas.