11 minute read
UNEARTHED
U N Words by Jelena Ćirić EARTH
E D Photography by GollI
Lucky number 12 After the death of Þorlákur Þórhallsson, Bishop of Skálholt, in 1193, stories of miracles that occurred in his diocese were collected as part of efforts to canonise him. The first of three volumes containing such accounts describes 46 occurrences, including a blind sheep gaining sight, a lost ship that was found, and a man saved from drowning, all thanks to Þorlákur’s holiness (and God’s omnipotence).
The thirty-third story tells of a bull that escaped certain death at Oddi, a prominent chieftain’s seat in South Iceland. When a cave at the Oddi farmstead collapsed on 12 bulls, crushing 11 of them instantly, it spared the twelfth, although trapped under several metres of rock. After a long day of digging, the bull was freed, walking off completely unharmed. The account is the oldest mention of a manmade cave in Iceland.
More than 800 years later, that bull drew archaeologist Kristborg Þórsdóttir to Oddi. She was curious about the story of the so-called “bull cave” and wanted to see if she could find it. What she uncovered was another miracle of sorts: the oldest manmade cave in Iceland that remains fully intact.
Oddi Like most Icelandic place names, the word “Oddi” is a straightforward geographical description. It means a spit of land – a point or tip – in this case, the one formed where the Ytri- and Eystri-Rangá rivers meet. We arrive there on a warm, overcast afternoon in late spring: buttercups dot the grass around the red-roofed church, snipes dive in the air above.
The dig lies a little further down the road, where a helmet-clad Kristborg welcomes us and walks us up onto a hillock to look over the site. As Icelandic landscapes go, it’s hardly impressive: gently rolling green hills and flat farmland as far as the eye can see. But archaeologists are endowed with x-ray vision. Kristborg points out a crevasse in the ground below, grown over with grass. “This is a cave that collapsed very early, where you see this trench. Underneath that heap, there is the entrance to a cave system. In a trench we dug through, we found the remains of a very large, manmade turf structure. There are more caves over there toward the church: most of the hillocks here have been dug into to some extent.” There was not only one cave at Oddi but a labyrinth of underground structures, some connected by tunnels, others with turf walls or foyers added onto them.
Oddi wasn’t the only site in Iceland where early settlers dug and utilised caves. “It’s known that there are caves all over South Iceland. There’s good stone for digging: sandstone and palagonite, and it’s quite soft,” Kristborg explains. “And it was known that there were caves here at Oddi. But I never expected to find one that was still intact. Especially not such a big one.”
Earthen calendar Kristborg first came to Oddi in 2009 to map sites of archaeological interest. “We went around the whole property and registered all of the known spots, including the indications of these caves.” In 2018 she had the opportunity to do some test excavation at the site, and she knew just where to start. “There was a very prominent drop here in the hill that indicated some sort of opening that led into the cave system. We did two test excavations here, and that’s how we found the mouth of this cave. We only reached the very top part: it was chock full of earth.”
Even so, the team was able to date the cave they
had discovered to the first half of the 10th century, only a few decades after Iceland’s permanent settlement began and nearly 300 years prior to the “bull cave” story. At the mouth of the cave, now fully dug out, Kristborg shows us how ash from volcanic eruptions has deposited streaks running through the soil, leaving a sort of millennial calendar. “This is the settlement layer,” she tells us, pointing to a thin stripe running through the earthen wall along the cave’s entrance. “And a little above, here, that’s the Katla eruption from 920 AD. Then above that, there’s a turf wall that contains ash from these eruptions. So, we can see that these layers of tephra had fallen here before this was built. We used that to date these structures.”
Cavemen-engineers The walls of the cave entrance also reveal the markings of the tools used to dig it. “We can see the shovel marks everywhere. We don’t know exactly what tools they used, but they would have had some sort of sharp edge. Shovels or axes, probably, and it would have been easy to dig because the rock is very soft.”
Digging the caves may not have taken much brawn, but it certainly took brains. “The people constructing them would have had to know something about the different layers of earth, how to maintain course as they’re digging, where to connect the caves, at the right height and all that. I find that to be an incredible amount of engineering knowledge for the early 10th century,” Kristborg effuses.
Even more remarkably, the regions from which most of Iceland’s settlers came (or through which they passed) don’t appear to have been sources of this knowledge. “There was no cave digging in Scandinavia: they don’t have the right type of rock there. There are some manmade caves in the British Isles, but not at all this kind of construction. So you wonder: is this knowledge that people can just acquire? Were they just more multitalented than people are today? Or is it knowledge that they bring with them from somewhere else?”
As they proceed with their research, the excavation team is trying to determine the order in which the caves and surrounding structures were built, which raises even more questions that Kristborg finds fascinating. “How did they make these caves? Why is there a turf wall in here? Was it all planned before they started, or did they just decide as they went along: ‘OK, let’s add a cave here’?”
Wood, bones, and… cheese? While the oldest manmade cave in Iceland is a treasure in itself, its interior has provided Kristborg’s
ARCHAEOLOGIST STEFÁN ÓLAFSSON
team with even more material to research. “There are a lot of organic remnants: hay, animal bones, and wood. It’s very rare to find those sorts of things in archaeological digs in Iceland, and it’s quite uncommon to find wood from this period that is still intact.” The organic matter was preserved so well because the cave remained closed that entire time; no oxygen could penetrate, and the surrounding soil stayed relatively moist. The temperature also remained a steady 5°C [41°F]. When the remnants are analysed this winter, experts will know more: where the wood came from, the age and health of the animals, and what sort of plants they were fed. Identifying insect species could give clues as to which kinds of animals were kept in this particular cave in the early 10th century.
What was – and wasn’t – found inside the cave indicates what it was likely used for: “Keeping animals. There is a lot of hay and some animal bones, but we’ve found no manmade objects. There are no indications that people inhabited this space.” But Kristborg says it’s possible other caves in the system had other uses. “What I want to know is if some of the caves closer to the farmstead were used as pantries. Oddi was the home of chieftains in later centuries, and all of the farmers within a large radius had to pay taxes to them, in the form of cheese, among other things. All of that food would have had to be stored somewhere. And caves are, of course, great fridges: they’re dark and cold, and the temperature is very consistent.”
Caves at other farmsteads in South Iceland were indeed used at pantries, even into the 20th century. At the farm Ægissíða, near Hella, one such cave pantry was even directly connected to the farm, a true luxury at the time. “We don’t know if that was the case here at Oddi, but we haven’t ruled it out.”
Caving in The intact cave is an especially remarkable find because the caves at Oddi usually collapsed, one after another. “There’s something about the sandstone here between the Rangá rivers: it seems there wasn’t enough tephra mixed with the sand when these hills were formed, so this sedimentary rock is not very well cemented. There were many caves here, but not many of them seem to have been preserved.” Manmade
ARCHAEOLOGIST KRISTBORG ÞÓRSDÓTTIR
caves at other sites, such as Ægissíða, seem to have remained in usable condition over much longer periods. Such caves were often ‘renovated’ over time, making it difficult for archaeologists to determine their original form. “But here we have a structure that was made very early and was used for a short time, so it’s a sort of prototype: we can see how they were constructing these caves early on.”
While the caves at Oddi were not used for as long as others in the region, Iceland’s cave-making tradition continued into the 20th century. “People had been digging and using caves here throughout that whole period, though probably with breaks. And there is still a lot that we don’t know about this tradition. For example, why some of these caves fell out of use.” At Oddi, the reason could be that they simply weren’t lasting long enough. But what about in other parts of the south? “Was it some sort of natural disaster, or the black death, which is cited as a catalyst for many changes in Iceland?” Kristborg asks. “The population shrinks, the caves close up and are forgotten? There’s a lot that has yet to be researched.” Foundation of power The funding that enabled Kristborg to dig at Oddi came from the LCMI Fund (RÍM in Icelandic), a special initiative intended to strengthen research at sites where Iceland’s medieval literary culture flourished. Oddi’s most famous inhabitant is from this period: Sæmundur fróði Sigfússon, or Sæmundur “the wise.” He was one of the first Icelanders to study in mainland Europe, returning to Oddi around 1057, where he served as its priest and wrote the first history of the Norwegian kings.
“We know a lot about Sæmundur fróði and the chieftains who lived here in the 11th century and later. That was the period the LCMI Fund wanted to focus on,” Kristborg says. “But then the remains we found were unexpectedly much older, which is a fascinating discovery – that there was a lot of activity here very early on: a great, big structure to house animals, which means there was extensive animal farming here. That, of course, laid the foundation for the chieftains’ power later on. We knew that people of different classes came to Iceland and appropriated areas of varying
size, but we hadn’t found anything of this scale from this time period.”
Other research at the site has also confirmed that there was human activity at Oddi from the very beginning of settlement. “The sources say that the land was first bought and settled early in the 10th century. But now we’ve confirmed there was some sort of human activity at Oddi from the beginning of settlement.”
New knowledge Next to the church, there is a small hill with a lookout. A test drill showed it probably contains a cave just as old as the one they’ve uncovered; from the early 10th century. It would take years to excavate all of the caves surrounding Oddi and a lot more funding. But for Kristborg, the discoveries at Oddi show that even a little funding can go a long way.
“When we talk about investing in roads or buildings, we talk in tens or hundreds of millions, but when it comes to funding research, then people start to hesitate, even though we’re talking about only a fraction of that money. And they’re even ready to build on top of these sites without having researched what’s underneath them. This excavation has shown that even with a small injection of funds, really amazing things can happen.”
The dig at Oddi has become a source of unprecedented scientific knowledge, but it is also something more: a very visceral link to Iceland’s settlers, some of the first people who made their home here 1,000 years ago. To be able to enter the same structure that they walked in and out of a millennium later, stand where they stood as they dug into the rock, and still today, see the individual markings left by each strike of their shovels, feels quite miraculous. I’m sure that Bishop Þorlákur would agree.
