Shielings In The Landscape: Seasonality, Transhumance And The Farm In Iceland

Shielings were seasonal sites where people and livestock gathered, typically in summer, as part of transhumance practices that were common across the North Atlantic region (and southern Europe). Shielings offer insights into past communities' organisation, resilience, and adaptation to internal as well as external pressures.

This book examines Icelandic shielings through historical, archaeological, and environmental perspectives, exploring their relationship to farms, landscapes, and socio-economic systems in which they operated. Several factors make this book distinctive.

The first is its focus on Iceland, a region that remains relatively underrepresented in international scholarship outside a specialist group of researchers. Iceland offers an exceptional setting for studying medieval and later rural lifeways: it has an unusually rich archaeological record from the 9th century CE onwards.

Earlier research has largely focused on high status or (earlier) sites, usually related to the Icelandic sagas. In contrast, this book highlights the more 'ordinary' and everyday sites such as shielings, that seldom appear in these extraordinary texts, but were, nonetheless, fundamental to the functioning of the medieval and later farm economy.

Second, due to the low level of land development outside of Reykjavík in Iceland, many of the medieval sites, such as shielings, are still visible on the surface, allowing for a level of clarity and interpretive potential not possible in many other areas of Europe. At the same time, some of the assumptions about sites, such as shielings, need unpacking.

This book offers an opportunity to do that by situating shielings within the wider landscape context and examining them through historical, archaeological, and environmental science disciplines.

Finally, an integrated model of Icelandic shielings - from 'mini-farms' to seasonal settlements to dairy production sites - is presented that not only clarifies their development and function within