ABSTRACT
Viđey is a small island just off Reykjavík, the capital city of Iceland. Recently, I ran an archaeological project exploring the material histories connected to an abandoned village at the eastern end of the island. The village is not old; it was founded at the start of the early twentieth century by a joint stock company and abandoned in the early 1940s, its existence bound up with the rise of industrialized fishing in Iceland (Lucas and Hreiđarsdóttir 2012). My interest in the village was connected to a larger, collaborative project studying aspects of modern ruins (see www.ruinmemories.org; also Olsen and Pétursdóttir 2014) but one of the key themes of my study was looking at how objects came together and dispersed at this location (Lucas 2014). A pivotal question that arose on encountering the site was: where did everything go? The place is decidedly eerie; not by any stretch of the imagination is it a classic ghost town, where the rooms survive with things strewn about as if abandoned all of a sudden. Iceland has plenty of these places, especially in the countryside. No, this site is in some ways more archaeological, in that for the most part, all that remain are stone and concrete foundations, cracking and covered with moss, slowly being covered by vegetation (Figure 17.1). A site halfway to be being buried – neither quite a conventional archaeological site, nor a classic ruin.
