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Man and Land

ABSTRACT The Norse settlements of the North Atlantic are located in dramatic landscapes, often a single farmstead at a time, sitting alone in a terrain devoid of cultural markers and monuments. This article attempts to explore how a sense of home could be constructed in landscapes like these. Based on the anthropologically informed threshold theory of determining the extent of home combined with archaeological data, the most likely limit of the Norse home can be demonstrated to be the home field boundary. There is, however, often at least one more encircling line to be found in the landscape around the farmstead: a line of cairns that crowns the horizon line behind the farmstead. When these cairns and the line they describe are compared to the extent of the landscape room of the particular site, they are seen to closely coincide with this. In this way, they strengthen the sense of home that shapes and is shaped by the extent of the landscape room, laying cultural claim to an otherwise entirely natural landscape. The cairns thus extend the Norse home into the natural landscape—the wild—and become the materialization of the relationship between North Atlantic nature and the culture of the Norse farmsteads.