Three cereal grains found at an archaeological site in Iceland have given researchers a fresh twist on the country’s settlement story, suggesting that early Norse settlers may have practiced small-scale farming almost immediately after arriving on the island in the late ninth century — earlier and more deliberately than previously assumed.
Key takeaways
- Cereal grains discovered at a settlement-era site point to early arable farming by the first Norse arrivals.
- The find challenges the idea that Iceland’s settlers relied solely on livestock and fishing at first.
- Archaeobotanical evidence is increasingly reshaping how historians read Iceland’s landnám period.
- The research adds to a growing body of work revisiting the Landnámabók account of Iceland’s colonisation.
Iceland’s settlement period — known as landnám, roughly 870–930 CE — has long been told through sagas and a single key text, the Landnámabók (Book of Settlements), which names the first settlers and their land claims. But physical evidence from the ground keeps complicating that tidy narrative, and three small grains are the latest example.
The grains — identified as barley, a crop that Norse settlers brought with them from Scandinavia and the British Isles — were recovered during excavation of a site tied to Iceland’s earliest occupation layer. Barley was the hardiest cereal available to Norse farmers, and finding it in Iceland at this date suggests settlers wasted little time trying to coax crops from volcanic soil, even as the climate was slightly warmer than it is today. That’s a meaningfully different picture from the received view of landnám as a purely pastoral and marine economy.
I’ve spent time walking through the National Museum of Iceland (Þjóðminjasafn Íslands) on Suðurgata here in Reykjavík, where the landnám exhibition does a good job of conveying just how resourceful the first settlers had to be. Seeing the scale of what they attempted — clearing birch scrub, building turf longhouses, managing sheep and cattle through dark winters — it’s not surprising they also tried grain. What surprises researchers is the timing and apparent intent behind it.
What does this mean for Iceland’s settlement history?
For archaeologists, botanical remains are often more reliable than saga accounts, which were written down centuries after the events they describe. A charred grain survives in a datable layer; a saga can be edited, embellished, or shaped by political motives. So when archaeobotanists find direct evidence of cereal cultivation at a stratified landnám-period site, it carries real weight.
The discovery also fits with a broader trend in Norse settlement studies. Research across the North Atlantic — at sites in Orkney, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland — consistently shows that Viking-age colonists arrived with a diversified subsistence strategy rather than a single economic focus. Iceland, it now seems, was no different. The three grains are a small find, but small finds have a way of quietly rewriting big histories.
Whether or not those early crops actually succeeded in Iceland’s short growing season is another question. Barley can ripen in cool climates, but Iceland’s volcanic soils and unpredictable frosts made cereal farming a marginal and eventually abandoned practice for most of the medieval period. The grains may represent aspiration as much as achievement — settlers testing what the land could offer before learning, through hard experience, what it could not.
Frequently asked questions
What grains were found at the Iceland settlement site?
The grains identified are cereal crops consistent with barley, the most cold-tolerant grain cultivated by Norse farmers. Barley was widely grown across Scandinavia and the Norse-settled British Isles, so settlers would have brought seed stock with them as part of their agricultural kit when they landed in Iceland during the landnám period.
How does this change what we know about Iceland’s landnám period?
It suggests early settlers attempted arable farming almost from the start, rather than relying exclusively on livestock, fishing, and hunting. This aligns Iceland more closely with other North Atlantic Norse colonies, where a mixed subsistence economy was the norm. It also highlights the limits of using only saga texts to reconstruct settlement-era life.
Did the Norse settlers in Iceland actually succeed at growing grain?
Evidence suggests cereal cultivation was attempted but became increasingly marginal over time. Iceland’s short growing season, volcanic soils, and cooling climate through the medieval period made barley farming difficult to sustain. By the high medieval period, grain agriculture had largely disappeared from Iceland, with settlers depending instead on livestock, fish, and imported goods.
