Integrated geoarchaeological methods for the determination of site activity areas: a study of a Viking Age house in Reykjavik, Iceland

Abstract

For over a decade, geoarchaeological methods such as multi-element analysis and soil micromorphology have been used to identify and interpret activity areas on archaeological sites. However, these techniques, along with others such as magnetic susceptibility, loss on ignition, and microrefuse, artefact and bone distribution analyses are rarely integrated in the study of a single site, even though they provide very different and potentially complementary data. This paper presents a comparative study of a wide range of geoarchaeological methods that were applied to the floors sediments of a Viking Age house at the site of Aðalstræti 16, in central Reykjavík, Iceland, along with more traditional artefact and bone distribution analyses, and a spatial study of floor layer boundaries and features in the building. In this study, the spatial distributions of artefacts and bones could only be understood in the light of the pH distributions, and on their own they provided limited insight into the use of space in the building. Each of the sediment analyses provided unique and valuable information about possible activity areas, with soil micromorphology proving to have the greatest interpretive power on its own. However, the interpretation potential of the geochemical methods was dramatically enhanced if they were integrated into a multi-method dataset.