UMass Boston Professor and Students Head for Iceland to Dig Into History
Adjunct Professor of Anthropology John Steinberg and a team of UMass Boston students will travel to within 60 miles of the Arctic Circle this summer, where they will search for answers to some long-standing questions about the country’s history.
Steinberg, the senior scientist at the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, and his team will be in Skagafjördur, Iceland from June 23 through August 10, where they will use remote sensing equipment to uncover Geldingaholt and Stora Seyla, Viking farmsteads that date back to 1000 A.D.
The trip is being made possible by a $240,000, three-year grant awarded this spring by the National Science Foundation, Steinberg’s fifth major grant. UMass Boston has received nearly $600,000 in NSF grants over the past four years, making it one of only two institutions without PhD programs in archaeology or anthropology to receive two senior grants from the foundation.
At the site, the Fiske Center team, along with researchers from Northwestern University, the University of Iceland, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, San Diego, will locate and excavate the large farmsteads and smaller homes that sprouted up around them. The mission: Figure out how Iceland evolved from the era of Viking chiefdoms into a larger, centralized government.
“From 875 to about 1000 there are just big houses evenly spread across the landscape. But at about 1000 there’s all these little farmsteads that pop up,” Steinberg said. “We’re trying to understand how the splitting off of these little farms allowed them to go from a bunch of competing chiefdoms to a unified state.”
To help answer that question, the researchers will use ground-penetrating radar to look for the turf walls of the Vikings’ homes. Next, a more precise sensing method which uses a combination of conductivity and resistivity will be used to map out the site in more detail, maximizing the effectiveness of the team’s excavation work, and minimizing the damage that the excavation can cause.
Steinberg hopes the digs will reveal what triggered the change, the specialization of workers, or expulsion of people from the big houses. And while his work doesn’t reveal much about the lives of individual Vikings, he’s well aware of the historical context.
“We don’t really know whose house we dig up. No one leaves their calling card, unless we find Erik was here,” Steinberg said with a chuckle, referring to Viking explorer Erik the Red. “My work is not connected directly to these wonderful old stories of these Vikings. But they’re always lurking in the background.”
About the Principal Investigator
John Steinberg’s love of archeology began in the sixth grade with a trip to the Mexican ruins of Chichen Itza with his grandfather. “I was hooked,” he said.
He earned a PhD and MA in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, a MSt in ethnology and museum ethnography from the University of Oxford, St. Peter’s College in England, and an AB in anthropology from the University of Chicago.
In 2001, Steinberg, who came to UMass Boston two years ago from UCLA, uncovered what is believed to be the ancient 1,500 square foot longhouse of Snorri Thorfinnsson and his parents, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir and Thorfinn Karlsefni, Vikings made famous by 13th-century Icelandic sagas.
Steinberg’s work in Iceland will be featured in a book to come out this fall, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman. Author Nancy Marie Brown visited Glaumbaer, Iceland in the summer of 2005.
Steinberg lives in Marblehead with his wife, NBC football sideline reporter Andrea Kramer, and their 6-year-old son.
About the Fiske Center
Created in 1999 with an endowment from the late Mrs. Andrew Fiske as a memorial to her late husband Andrew, the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research supports research in landscape, environmental and historical archaeology as well as environmental history. For more information, call 617-287-6859 or email Fiskecenter@umb.edu.