UCLA CMRS | A Viking Landscape: the Mosfell Archaeological Project

"A Viking Landscape, the Mosfell Archaeological Project," is a 15-minute video outlining Professor Jesse Byock's archaeological work in the Mosfell Valley of Iceland.

Prof. Byock is UCLA Professor of Old Norse and Medieval Scandinavia (Scandinavian Section) and Professor at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. He leads an international archaeological team excavating at Mosfell in Iceland. Colleagues include Phillip Walker - co-director (UCSB), Davide Zori - Field Director (UCLA), John Erlandson (University of Oregon), Per Holck (University of Oslo), and Magnus Gudmundsson (University of Iceland). An account of both the history and the recent findings of the Mosfell Archaeological Project has been published in Medieval Archaelogy, Journal of the Society for medieval Archaeology, Volume XLIX, 2005.

Excavation is part of a research approach that uses archaeology, history, anthropology, forensics, environmental sciences, and saga studies to construct a picture of human habitation, power relationships, religious and mortuary practices, and environmental change in the region of Mosfellssveit in southwestern Iceland. The valley system with surrounding highlands and lowland coastal areas has interlocking natural and cultural components which developed from the 9th-century settlement of Iceland into a Viking Age chieftaincy dominated by the family at Mosfell/Hrísbrú. Excavations of both pagan and Christian sites are providing significant information on the changing periods of occupation, with implications for the larger study of Viking North Atlantic..

During the Viking Age, Mosfell was a self-contained social and economic unit connected to the rest of Iceland through a network of roads, including a major East-West route to the nearby assembly place for the yearly Althing. With its ship's landing or port at Leirvogur, in the bay at the valley 's mouth, the region was in commercial and cultural contact with the larger Scandinavian and European worlds