On Water: An Entangled Approach to Water Use at Kirkjubæjarklaustur and Þingeyraklaustur
On Water: An Entangled Approach to Water Use at Kirkjubæjarklaustur and Þingeyraklaustur
Delaney Dammeyer
Water and its role in cultural landscapes is not often studied in archaeological sites. In an archaeological and material sense, water has a taken-for-granted quality in its role in any cultural gathering space. We are aware of the need for it – we cannot survive without it – but not many sites present with clear answers to the questions: “how were the people here sourcing clean water?” Archaeologists like Ian Hodder use the frame of entanglement – in which things and people are interdependent on one another and each is constantly influencing the identity and meaning of the other – to talk about historic communities and their relationship to the natural world.
Entanglement is also useful in a multi-disciplinary, multidata point approach and will form the basis of this research on the use and organization of water at Kirkjubæjarklaustur and Þingeyraklaustur. In doing so, information from landscape analysis, review of primary source literature, and traditional archaeological analysis can be looked at together as connected. Readings of Icelandic medieval literature formed a basis of knowledge about water features and the shape of the environmental around the year 1200. Landscape analysis through the program ArcGIS then put water features in context to the archaeological site and measured numerous changes to the natural world of the monastic sites. Finally, analysis of artifact and stratigraphy data was conducted within the continuum of landscape and literary data. These data are presented and considered as small, interconnected parts of a whole environmental story of monasticism in Iceland.
Fyrirlesturinn er hluti af Nýjar rannsóknir í fornleifafræði 2025, fyrirlestraröð Félags fornleifafræðinga og námsbrautar í fornleifafræði við Háskóla Íslands. Fyrirlesturinn fer fram í stofu 202 í Odda, Háskóla Íslands.