Introduction

This report details the results of zooarchaeological analysis of the animal bone collection

from the site of Litlibær, Nes in Seltjarnarnes Iceland. The excavation at Litlibær at Nes, Seltjarnarnes (64°09.561N/22°00.734W) took place in May and June 2012 as part of an

undergraduate course for archaeology students at the University of Iceland.

The site consists of a building with a concrete cellar and a sunken concrete tank which

likely belong to more than one construction phase. The structures at the site were built at the beginning of the 20th century as a fisherman’s cottage but it was converted to a summerhouse in the 1930s (Lucas, Ólafsson, Pálsdóttir, & Skarphéðinsson, 2019).

Documentary records show that there was a hay barn and byre added to the house some

time before 1930; artefacts found at the site indicate that milking was taking place and

memoirs of a former inhabitant tell that horses were also kept at Litlibær (Lucas et al., 2019).

The buildings at Litlibær were torn down sometime between 1942 and 1954 (Lucas et al.,

2019). The Litlibær excavation is unusual with its focus on the very recent past and the

amount of documentary evidence, photographs and information about the buildings and its

inhabitants.

The excavation used the single context excavation method and animal bones were recovered and bagged by context (Lucas & Ólafsson, n.d.; Lucas et al., 2019). The animal

bone collection from Litlibær is hand collected. A single context a wet deposit at the bottom

of the cess tank, number [13836], was sieved but there were no bones or finds from that

context.

Since it was not possible to clearly assign the excavated contexts at Litlibær to the

different phases of the occupation and due to the relatively small size of the archaeofauna,

the material will be analysed in a single phase.