Charred remains of grains and seeds from the medieval high-status farm site of Reykholt in western Iceland

Abstract

Iceland was settled, primarily by peoples from Norway and the northern British Isles, in the 9th and 10th centuries. The first settlers brought with them from their homelands an agricultural system based on animal husbandry, of which cereal cultivation was an element and also with inputs from fishing, hunting and gathering of wild plants. There are strong indications that barley was cultivated during the first centuries in some parts of the country and that cultivation was at least attempted in other areas. However, Iceland is near the climatic limits of the barley-growing zone, and it is open to discussion how reliable a food source locally grown barley would have been. This paper discusses a seed assemblage of cultivated barley and archetypical weeds of cereal crops dated to between the 10th and 12th centuries AD obtained during archaeological excavations at the high status farm of Reykholt in western Iceland.     

A pre‐Columbian case of congenital syphilis from Anatolia (Nicaea, 13th century AD)

In this study, the skeleton of an approximately 15‐year‐old child, dating back to the Late Byzantine period (13th century AD) is examined with the aim of determining where this specimen fits in the continuing arguments on the origins of syphilis. It was unearthed during an excavation at an amphitheatre in Nicaea dating to the Roman period. The Nicaea specimen displays common symptoms found in the majority of people with congenital syphilis such as Hutchinson's incisor, mulberry molar, darkened enamel, radial scar on frontal bone, sabre tibia, syphilitic dactylitis, and gummatous and non‐gummatous osteomyelitis on almost every post‐cranial bone. Because of the sub‐periosteal new bone formation, the medullary spaces in some long bones are narrowed or completely obliterated. These lesions, which were observed via macroscopic and radiological examination, reflect the late stages of congenital syphilis. The specimen, when examined together with increasing numbers of other finds from the Old World, contributes to the argument that venereal syphilis did exist in the Old World before 1493, and brings forward the need to revise the Columbian hypothesis, which maintains that syphilis is a new disease carried to the Old World from the New World by Columbus' crew. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cases of hydatid disease in medieval Iceland

Eight individuals with calcified cysts preserved in the thorax and abdomen, one of which had a maximum diameter of 17–20 cm, were recovered during recent excavations at Skriðuklaustur, a medieval monastic site which also functioned as a hospital during its operation from AD 1493–1554 in Eastern Iceland. Hydatid cysts are the result of parasitic infection by Echinococci commonly in the liver and lungs of the accidental human host. Echinococcus granulosus was likely introduced to Iceland soon after the settlement period (9th century AD) and became endemic around AD1200 when dogs were introduced from Germany. It has since been eradicated in Iceland due to an extensive educational literature programme and government controls implemented since the mid‐1800s. Reviews of the palaeopathological literature mentioning calcified shell fragments indicated hydatism to be the most logical aetiology. The eight individuals in question were buried in close proximity to one another. This may indicate that this particular ailment (sullaveiki) had its own classification during the medieval period in Iceland and perhaps even a distinct treatment if not in life, at least in death. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

DISOBEDIENT BOYS AND PROMISCUOUS GIRLS

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, numerous public investigations have been carried out around the world on the abuse of children in out-of-home care. In the case of Iceland, commissions were appointed by the Icelandic government in 2007 to examine the historical abuse of children and youth in institutions monitored by local or state authorities during the second half of the 20th century. All the institutions subject to national investigations in Iceland were created during the postwar era, the earliest one in 1947. This article addresses the discourse on institutions and out-of-home care from a long-time perspective. It is shown that ideas on those institutions came to the fore during the early 20th century and were closely linked to progressive ideas on child welfare at the time. World War II and the British occupation of Iceland shaped the views on institutional care, and the postwar era was a period of intensive institutionalization of children and youth. The study also shows that the rhetoric concerning disobedient youth was heavily gendered. Whereas boys were accused of petty larceny, truancy and vagrancy, the main evils of girls were related to their morals, promiscuity being their chief vice.     

Iceland and the Nordic Model of Consensus Democracy

The Nordic countries – including Iceland – have been portrayed in the political-science literature as consensual democracies, enjoying a high degree of legitimacy and institutional mechanisms which favour consensus-building over majority rule and adversarial politics. In this explorative article the author argues that consensus politics, meaning policy concertation between major interest groups in society, a tendency to form broad coalitions in important political issues and a significant cooperation between government and opposition in Parliament, is not an apt term to describe the political reality in Iceland during the second half of the 20th century. Icelandic democracy is better described as more adversarial than consensual in style and practice. The labour market was rife with conflict and strikes more frequent than in Europe, resulting in strained government–trade union relationship. Secondly, Iceland did not share the Nordic tradition of power-sharing or corporatism as regards labour market policies or macro-economic policy management, primarily because of the weakness of Social Democrats and the Left in general. Thirdly, the legislative process did not show a strong tendency towards consensus-building between government and opposition with regard to government seeking consultation or support for key legislation. Fourthly, the political style in legislative procedures and public debate in general tended to be adversarial rather than consensual in nature.     

Missing or Misdiagnosed? General Paralysis of the Insane,Yaws, and Syphilis in Fiji, 1884–1940

ABSTRACT

General Paralysis of the Insane (GPI) was a deadly disease, once common in Fiji’s lunatic asylum and, by the early 20th century, thought to be caused by syphilis. The conundrum is that the majority of GPI sufferers in the asylum were Indigenous Fijians, considered to have immunity to syphilis. This immunity was probably through the prevalence of yaws amongst Indigenous Fijians. Yaws had symptoms similar to GPI and syphilis with which it was easily confused. Yaws and syphilis also invoked divergent scientific and moral discourses, with implications for how medical and scientific knowledge about the aetiology of GPI and associated moral discourses were transferred to Fiji. This paper discusses European nosology and diagnosis of GPI, yaws and syphilis, asking if GPI was misdiagnosed in Fiji, or if reports of GPI among Fijians and the effects of yaws on the nervous system are missing from tropical medicine orthodoxy.     

Life on the Edge of the Arctic: The Bioarchaeology of the Keldudalur Cemetery in Skagafjörður,Iceland

Burials were examined from the late Viking Age early medieval Christian cemetery at the farm of Keldudalur in the Skagafjörður region, Northern Iceland. The cemetery likely served a single household for about 100–120 years, from the beginning of the 11th century AD to the turn of the 12th century. Cemetery inhabitants represent a population that lived through the transitional period when Christianity was established in Iceland. The changes are visible in the mortuary record with the changeover from outlying pagan graves to enclosed Christian cemeteries situated on the farmsteads. Keldudalur is one of the numerous early Christian family cemeteries that littered the 11th century Skagafjörður landscape. The burials included 53 well‐preserved skeletons of 27 adults and 26 subadults. Various factors such as fluctuating climate and environmental conditions, and seasonal or periodical availability of resources have the potential for impacting human diet and health over time. To assess the health status of the burials, data were collected for a number of health status indicators such as stature estimation, developmental enamel defects, porotic hyperostosis, infectious disease, trauma, degenerative joint diseases, dental caries, calculus and tooth loss. Results suggest that inhabitants of Keldudalur experienced periodic stress and rigorous living conditions. Infant mortality was great, although if individuals survived childhood, the age expectancy was fairly high. There was no obvious evidence for interpersonal violence or endemic infectious disease. However, the common occurrence of growth disturbances, generalised periostitis, trauma and degenerative joint disease all point to a number of stressors in the lives of the people at Keldudalur, which is suggestive of a resilient people living and adapting to a harsh and periodically resource scarce subarctic environment. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The application of numerical techniques to insect assemblages from the site of Stóraborg,Iceland

The problems of interpretation of many overlapping species lists of fossil assemblages are discussed using the example of insect faunas from a late medieval farm site in southern Iceland. Numerical techniques were employed, principally those available within the CLUSTAN package, and it was concluded that a considerable refinement in interpretation was achieved. Such quantitative procedures are suitable for groups other than fossil insects but their employment cannot be regarded as a substitute for, rather than an adjunct to, a sound ecological approach.     

Treponematosis in Pre-Columbian Jamaica: a biocultural approach to the human cranium found in Bull Savannah

The first inhabitants of Jamaica are now generally referred to as Taínos. It is likely that they arrived in the island after about 650 AD and were extinct by the end of the 16th century. In 1968, during the exploration of a small cave in Bull Savannah, St. Elizabeth parish, Dr. James Lee found two skulls, teeth, bones, and pottery. The aim of this work is to interpret in a biocultural perspective the one cranium with pathological lesions, such as caries sicca. This adult individual had an artificially modified cranium, a cultural practice common among Taínos, which was studied macroscopically and by radiological and computerized tomography. The radiocarbon dates, obtained by AMS, point to the 10th–11th centuries AD and the stable isotopes analysis revealed either the ingestion of a mixed C3/C4 plant diet or an extensive intake of marine resources, the former being more likely. This is the first cranium to be found in Jamaica with evidence of Pre-Columbian treponematosis, most probably syphilis, which has also been demonstrated in a few cases elsewhere in the Caribbean region. This finding agrees with the ethnohistorical narrative, according to which syphilis existed among the native population, who used plant extracts to treat the disease. This paper contributes to our knowledge about the Taínos and the history of treponematosis in the Americas.     

‘Brothel of the Pacific’: Syphilis and the Urban Regulation of Laikini Wahine in Honolulu, 1855–75

ABSTRACT

By 1860, Hawai‘i’s Indigenous population had declined by 75 per cent when compared to its estimated pre-contact level. Legislators and physicians attributed this crisis to the seasonal migration of Hawaiian prostitutes. After contracting syphilis from sailors in Honolulu, these women returned to their Native villages where they unwittingly spread the disease. Drawing on legislation, health reports, and newspapers, this article underscores the urban-rural nature of Hawai‘i’s syphilis epidemic by analyzing the 1860 Act to Mitigate the Evils and Diseases Arising from Prostitution (ATM). The law compelled prostitutes to enlist on a government registry, undergo medical inspections, and submit to treatment if infected. Arresting depopulation, adherents argued, hinged on the government’s ability to police Indigenous women within a conspicuous urban environment. In designing and enacting the ATM, legislators and physicians characterized Honolulu as a syphilitic breeding ground that catalyzed Indigenous depopulation by sheltering transient carriers of this highly gendered disease.     

The Roles of Pit Houses and Gendered Spaces on Viking-Age Farmsteads in Iceland

Abstract

THE SMALL SEMI-SUBTERRANEAN buildings (jarðhús) with slab-built ovens that have been found on many Viking-Age farmsteads in Iceland (late 9th–11th century) have been subject to wide-ranging interpretations, from short-lived, expedient dwellings to saunas, women’s workrooms, the houses of Slavic settlers and in one case a cult building. This paper tests these hypotheses by making a thorough revaluation of pit-house dates, architectural forms, internal structural features and artefacts, and presents new geoarchaeological evidence from the pit house at Hofstaðir, NE Iceland. This lends strong support to the interpretation that they were women’s workrooms, primarily for the production of woollen textiles. Their abandonment in the later 10th and 11th centuries may be interpreted in the light of changing religious beliefs and social structures, the growing importance of homespun cloth as a valuable export commodity, and the rise in status of the women who made it.     

Is Unresolved Inflammatory Angiogenesis a Mechanism for the Delayed Development of Skeletal Lesions in Syphilis?

A recently described case of putative early tertiary syphilis in a young adult male from 6th century Anglo‐Saxon England exhibits a distinctive endocranial pathology. A case–control study using both clinical and archaeological materials was performed to investigate a possible association of the pathology with syphilis. Scanning electron microscopy and microcomputed tomography were used to image the syphilitic case and normal cranial material. Although the pathology does seem to have an association with syphilis (OR = 13.14), the sample size is small, and the authors caution against overinterpretation of the results. The study confirms observations by other authors suggesting the lesion has some association with a range of pathological conditions. Any association with syphilis seems to be restricted to the early tertiary stages and is possibly absent in the later stages of the disease. The morphological differences present in the samples observed by scanning electron microscopy and microcomputed tomography illustrate the abnormal nature of the vascularity within the syphilitic cranium. The widespread presence of similar lesions within other tubular bones leads the authors to propose hypothesis that unresolved angiogenesis is the underlying mechanism behind the skeletal changes in tertiary syphilis. This angiogenic model accounts for several diverse characteristics in the progression of skeletal disease resulting from infection by spirochetes of the Treponema pallidum family. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Historical Osteoarchaeology in Iceland

Historical osteoarchaeology has not been at the forefront of archaeological research in Iceland. Large-scale excavations of historical cemeteries did not start until the mid-twentieth century, and all excavations of historical cemeteries until the early twenty-first century were development led. This fact means that many of the projects carried out did not have an osteoarchaeological focus, nor asked specific osteological questions of the material, as well as the fact that the state of the publication of these sites is very varied. This paper presents a summary of the larger excavations of historical cemeteries in Iceland alongside discussions of the various approaches to the presentation of the analysis of the skeletal remains of those sites that have been published from Jón Steffensen??s focus on identifying the individuals at seventeenth-to-eighteenth-century Skálholt and Hólar; to the evidence presented for the hospital in sixteenth-century Skrieuklaustur and the influence of increased urbanization in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Reykjavík on the palaeopathology of those buried there.     

Paleopathology of The Population of Krasnoyarsk,Central Siberia (Pokrovskiy and Voskresensko-Preobrazhenskiy Cemeteries of the 17th– Early 20th Centuries)

Published data on the paleopathology of Siberian populations are scarce. However, two samples of adult and non- adult skeletons taken from excavations at the Pokrovskiy (17th–18th centuries) and Voskresensko-Preobrazhenskiy (17th–early 20th century) cemeteries in Krasnoyarsk (123 and 204; 101 and 81, respectively) revealed cases of rickets, tuberculosis, and congenital syphilis in children, and vertebral tuberculosis and tertiary syphilis in adults. Trauma areas included ribs, hands, forearms, and tibiae. These two samples provide evidence on which to base an assessment of the health of the Krasnoyarsk population from 1628 to the early 1900s.     

Theoretical change and therapeutic innovation in the treatment of syphilis in mid-nineteenth-century France

This article examines changes in the treatment of venereal disease in mid-nineteenth-century France in light of theoretical developments in the understanding of these diseases. It focuses on three theories of venereal disease: the orthodox theory of the "unity" of gonorrhea and syphilis; the physiological theory of Fran?ois Broussais, which essentially denied the actual existence of such a disease; and Philippe Ricord's new doctrine of venereal disease, a theory that is often credited with having established the distinction between syphilis and gonorrhea. The argument is that theoretical considerations played a major role in the evaluation of the relative merits of these theories and that any understanding of the appeal of Ricord's new doctrine must consider not only its pathological claims but its therapeutic implications as well. This was not, however, simply an instance of theory applied. These two aspects of Ricord's new doctrine, its pathology and its therapeutics, were inextricably bound up with one another, so that judgment of the one necessarily entailed judgment of the other. The argument is that therapeutic practice should not be seen simply as a downwind consequence of changes in the theoretical understanding of disease, but rather as an integral part of the process of change. These were the kinds of developments that led doctors to believe that French medicine was making very real progress at mid-century.     

Digging deeper into the limits of ancient DNA research on syphilis

The search for the origins of syphilis has a long history in the medical and anthropological literatures. If we know more about the emergence of the pathogen that causes the disease in humans we will understand its evolution through time and space as well as shed light on its current state in living populations. Ancient DNA techniques used to isolate Treponema pallidum subsp. pallidum DNA from archaeological human specimens provide direct evidence of its existence in the past. However to date, only Kolman et al. (1999) have been successful in this endeavour, while other attempts have failed (e.g., Barnes and Thomas, 2006; Bouwman and Brown, 2005). Why has there been little success? This paper serves to compliment and add relevant information to Bouwman and Brown's and Barnes and Thomas' discussion concerning our inability to apply ancient DNA techniques to study venereal syphilis in past human populations.Our approach utilized 15 different human specimens from different geographies and different temporal periods: eight samples come from medically diagnosed individuals archived during the American Civil War period; six originate from the United Kingdom and predate 1492 with four of these samples having been previously analyzed by Bouwman and Brown and one sample comes from historic Canada. Human mitochondrial and amelogenin DNA, as well as several genes from the Treponema organism were analyzed revealing the relatively good preservation of human multi-copy and single copy DNA but not treponemal DNA. This study also incorporates a unique molecular experiment using rabbits infected with venereal syphilis to help illustrate that treponemal DNA disseminates to bone early during the first stages of infection but is not present in later stages of the disease using the techniques presented in this study.     

Reassembling the household for Icelandic archaeology: a contribution to comparative political economy

SUMMARY: Between the 11th and 19th centuries, household archaeology in Iceland comprises rural, dispersed farmsteads notable for their boundedness and stability, suggesting productive and reproductive autonomy. Insights from Actor-Network Theory and entanglement theory help ‘disassemble’ this assumption by shifting our focus first to the agencies, flows and dependences that comprise a political economy without assuming the household’s relations of production a priori. Architecture, settlement patterns, landscape and midden accumulations from the Langholt region in Skagafjörður, North Iceland, along with historical data illustrate that households in Iceland are actually marked by social dissolution, alienation and instability through dramatic political-economic dis- and re-assembling which in turn produces the stability in the material manifestation of the household. These data caution against a simple relationship between the household and archaeological farmstead, and suggest that measures of dependency and instability are critical to a comparative method for unravelling entanglements between capitalist and non-capitalist political economies.     

Structures and Agency: a transnational comparison of the struggle for women's suffrage in the Nordic countries during the long 19th century

This article is a transnational comparison of the struggle for women's suffrage during the long 19th century, mainly around 1900, with an emphasis on the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). The article questions the widespread notion of these countries as similar democratic and peaceful nations, different from the rest of Europe. It points to the timing of women's suffrage and to how the claim for this reform challenged the gendered meaning of political citizenship as well as core elements in the understandings of masculinity and femininity. It proceeds to analyse important structural changes that have been seen as vehicles for women's suffrage: the growth of democracy, the construction of nation states, revolutions and wars, asking if these structures played as important a role in the Nordic countries as elsewhere. Finally, the article concentrates on women's agency, mobilization and organization, looking for similarities and differences among the five Nordic countries.     

Dating problems in Icelandic archaeology

For many decades tephrochronology has been used as a scientific method for dating archaeological as well as geological remains in Iceland. Recently, parts of the tephrochronology for the eruptions of the famous volcano Hekla have been questioned by the author. This is due to obvious differences in dating results of archaeological artefacts from the valley of Thjórsárdalur in southern Iceland and the current tephrochronological dating of its devastation. While the devastation of the valley has been dated to AD 1104 and is thought to have been caused by a huge eruption of mount Hekla in that year, the artefacts from excavations and stray finds, as well as new ¹⁴C results, show somewhat later 12th‐13th century dates. The paper deals with this obvious discrepancy, which has hitherto been ignored, together with the results of archaeological excavations in 1983–86 at Stóng in Thjórsárdalur; it also gives a critical analysis of the historical methodology of the tephrochronologists.     

The Peopling of Iceland

In recent years intensive archaeological research on the Viking Age in Iceland has produced much new evidence supporting a late 9th century colonization of the country. It can now be stated not only that people had arrived in Iceland before AD 870 but also that comprehensive occupation only took place after that date. The increased temporal resolution of the new archaeological data not only allows the characterization of different phases of the colonization but also supports assessments of the scale and rate of the immigration. In this paper we report the results of fieldwork in Mývatnssveit, NE-Iceland, where more than 30 sites have been investigated, ranging from small test trenches to large-scale open area excavations. We argue, based on the Mývatnssveit data, that a minimum of 24,000 people must have been transported to Iceland in less than 20 years to account for the dates and density of the Mývatn sites. In the absence, so far, of comparable data from other parts of the country these conclusions must remain hypothetical but if supported by further work they will have significant implications for our understanding of first peopling of Holocene farming populations in general and of Viking Age migrations in particular.