The Norse in Iceland Page 1 of 36 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Oxford University Press - Main Account; date: 11 July 2016 The Norse in Iceland Davide Marco Zori Abstract and Keywords The Norse discovery and settlement of Iceland in the late ninth century AD offers a test case for the study of human impacts on previously unoccupied landscapes and the formation of new societies under challenging conditions. The Norse Viking Age settlement of the island serves as a cautionary tale about the anthropogenic destruction of fragile environments, while simultaneously providing lessons about the strategic management of marginal ecosystems and nuanced examples of societal evolution and secondary state formation. Archaeological investigation of these processes is complemented by oral traditions preserved in the Icelandic sagas. Although researchers debate the proper use of the sagas, the strength of recent research is its interdisciplinary nature, combining a suite of available tools of inquiry. Keywords: Viking Age, North Atlantic, Iceland, Norse, Scandinavian history, medieval, archaeology, migration, Landnám Perceptions of the Norse settlement of Iceland have largely depended on written sources, including sagas and historical works like Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements) and Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders). These texts provide details of immense anthropological value, but they have distinct limitations because they are based on oral tradition and were written down a century or more after the Viking Age (AD 790–1100). Reliance on texts is changing due to mounting quantities of data from archaeology and the related hard sciences. As archaeology has matured in Iceland, the discipline is increasingly providing new information not available in the written sources. Archaeological research is going beyond merely confirming or refuting information from written sources by helping to answer questions that the texts cannot. The challenge now is to integrate the two approaches, making use of traditional historical scholarship while simultaneously employing the full potential of archaeology and its subfields of geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology, and ethnobotany, as well as insights from geology, geophysics, palynology, and entomology. Researchers are on the cusp of a flood of new data concerning the Norse in Iceland, promising breakthroughs on a number of key Subject: Archaeology, Archaeology of Europe, Migration Online Publication Date: May 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935413.013.7 Oxford Handbooks Online