Integrated geoarchaeological methods for the determination of site activity areas: A study of a Viking Age house in Reykjavik, Iceland

For over a decade, geoarchaeological methods such as multi-element analysis and soil micromorphology have been used to identify and interpret activity areas on archaeological sites. However, these techniques, and others such as loss on ignition, magnetic susceptibility, microrefuse analysis and artefact distributions, are rarely integrated into the same study, even though they provide very different and potentially complementary data. This paper presents a comparative study of a wide range of geoarchaeological methods that were applied to the floors sediments of a 10th-century house at the site of Aðalstræti 14-18, in central Reykjavík, Iceland, along with more traditional artefact and bone distribution analyses, and a spatial study of floor layer boundaries and features in the building. In this study, the spatial distributions of artefacts and bones could only be understood in the light of the pH distributions, and on their own they provided only limited insight into the use of space in the building. Each of the sediment analyses provided unique and valuable information about possible activity areas, with soil micromorphology proving to have the greatest interpretive power on its own. However, the interpretation potential of the geochemical methods was dramatically enhanced if they were integrated into a multi-method dataset.