Spring24_Week9 – Experimental Archaeology / Experiential History

Our class inside the completed booth and tent.

Lab Summary Week 9: Turf Building

By Evan Orjala and Max Serota Introduction Early Icelandic Viking settlers encountered an environment that lacked the materials traditionally used for housing in their native Scandinavia; Iceland’s relatively young landscape lacked large forests with wood with which to build the walls and roofs of permanent shelters, nor was its volcanic rock suitable for building sturdy…

Week 9 Group A Data

This week we made turf walls in the style of Icelandic turf houses. My group, A was building end course blocks in a triangle wedge shape. Our blocks are oriented with the grass facing horizontally, not vertically, as we want the grass to be smothered by the dirt and not grow in our walls. We…

Week 9 Data: Group B

For this week’s lab, we set out to make a structure out of turf, one which would be large enough to hold up our tent we made in week 8 and one that could act as benches upon which we could sit on inside of the tent. The purpose of this activity was to replicate…

GROUP D WEEK 9 LAB DATA: TURF BUILDING

This week in lab, we built turf walls to combine with the previous week’s wood tent, to recreate a traditional Icelandic booth (“tjald-buo”). We constructed our turf from a few different styles of block or strip, and my group, D, made Glumbauer blocks to build one of the longer walls. These were a longer style…

Week 9: Turf Building Data Group E

This week we did turf building, or creating some walls for our tent using sections of turf. My group was in charge of making milk-pen blocks of turn, which were rectangles that were supposed to be about 6 inches wide by 12 inches long and about three inches deep. Cutting out the first block was…

Week 9: Turf-Building Data Report, Group C

On Thursday of Week 9, our Experimental Archaeology/Experiential History class worked on reconstructing an Icelandic-style turf building. In our previous lab, we constructed the Viking-era tent and this week we will be recreating the “booth” upon which we will place our tent. We experienced different construction methods, with different groups using different types of turf…

Week 9 Group F Data Report: Turf Building

This was, admittedly, not the optimal week for me to be data reporter since I left the lab early, but in the time I was there, I recorded what I could! This was mainly observational/qualitative data, and does not lend itself to graphical summaries. The first thing I observed was the size of our blocks.…