Norse Coastal Farms Field Report of a Survey in the Southwest “Vatnahverfi Peninsula” Summer 2009 (field report)

Beginning in 2005 as a research project under the IPY, the Vatnahverfi Project initiated a series of
years of renewed field work in the Vatnahverfi region, South Greenland (Arneborg et al. 2009,
Møller&Madsen 2005, 2006, Møller et al. 2007). Continued under a new and broader research
agenda – Resources, Resiliency, and Cultural Identity in Norse Greenland ca.985 – 1450 – though
still coordinated from the Danish National Museum by Jette Arneborg, the field work in
Vatnahverfi has since kept expanding and branching out, yearly bringing into play new research
aims and new research collaborators.
The original aim of the Vatnahverfi Project was to provide a uniform documentation and survey of
the farms and shielings of the area known to the Medieval Norse as Vatnahverfi (the settled area
with many lakes and rivers), in order to facilitate modern analysis of the farms, their place in and
use of the landscape, on a regional scale. This field work was, with minor supplementary surveys,
finished in 2006. However, the brief time spent in the coastal area of the Vatnahverfi and the
interdisciplinary discussions inspired of these experiences, has led to the idea that in order to
understand the settlement system of the Norse, we need to embrace the entire system, not only the
farms in the inner fjords, which have been the focus of archaeological attention since the earliest
days of Norse research. The coastal region was, in fact and as will demonstrated in the following,
fairly densely settled and with farms of considerable size. The location of these farms in areas with
poorer grazing land, but better access to the bounties of the sea, might have been of high importance
in a medieval community that increasingly depended on marine resources, e.g. seals, for their
subsistence. In any case, the farms of the coastal zone has to long been overlooked in the discussion
of the medieval Norse. Thus, one aim and first part of the 2009 field season, running roughly from
the 24
th
of June - 12
th
of July (plus the 20
th
-22
nd
of July), was to survey 20 (though 30 were actually
visited) of the known ruins in the coastal region of the Vatnahverfi Peninsula, i.e. the area between
the fjords Igalikup Kangerlua (Igaliku Fjord) and Agdluitsup Kangerlua (Lichtenau Fjord).