This volume has the immediate goal of publishing the results of the Mosfell Archaeological Project (MAP) and the ultimate goal of reinvigorating a text-informed archaeology of Viking Age Iceland. It succeeds in both of these objectives, if at times by provocation. The MAP set out to interpret how a Viking Age chieftaincy worked at the scales of both settlement (the church farm of Hrísbrú) and landscape (the Mosfell Valley, near Reykjavík in western Iceland), using all available textual evidence in addition to archaeological survey and excavation. This would seem uncontroversial enough, but the key documentary sources are later medieval quasi-historical narrative accounts written several centuries after the events described. These include Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements), the historicity of which has been the subject of much debate, and (more literary still) ‘family sagas’ such as the wonderfully evocative Egil's Saga.

Many schools of medieval archaeology, history and literature would eschew this eclectic combination of sources, citing the political and literary (rather than historical) bases of many of the relevant texts. The difficulty of identification in historical archaeology (e.g. who was buried at Sutton Hoo?) is particularly fraught, raising questions of both methodology and significance (at least until the world was curiously enthralled by the discovery of the remains of Richard III in Leicester!). It is an issue with deep roots in Icelandic historiography. Enthusiastic antiquarian efforts to equate material remains with saga texts led to a lengthy scholarly reaction that peaked in Icelandic archaeology during the 1990s and 2000s.

The position of the MAP is that this reaction went too far, discarding baby with bathwater, robbing archaeologists of valuable tools and stripping landscapes of potentially real historical characters, including the chieftains of Mosfell and the famous warrior-poet Egil Skallagrímsson, who may have died at Hrísbrú. From the perspective of an international historical archaeology this is entirely persuasive—one must simply apply appropriate source criticism. In the remarkable context of Iceland, however, the saga literature is so rich and so iconic that special rules are often applied. A very strong dose of scepticism is typically thought to be appropriate before entering what many consider a minefield rather than a goldmine.

Having set its agenda, does the book deliver? The result is certainly an excavation monograph that is far more readable than most. In large measure it is an exercise in carefully reporting the excavation of an exceptionally well-preserved tenth- to eleventh-century longhouse with an adjacent stave church and burial ground representing Iceland's conversion period. The buildings, burials, human remains, artefacts, ecofacts and landscape are all documented and interpreted in a scholarly way, with the theme of chiefly power strategies providing a unifying thread. An exceptionally informative study of pollen and other microfossils illuminates the impact of initial settlement, and finds of charred barley grain in the house document local cereal cultivation, an essential prerequisite for the chiefly feasting (see also Zori et al. 2013). A final chapter provides an international perspective by reporting the evidence of North Atlantic contacts from the major Viking Age town of Hedeby, on the Schlei fjord leading to the Baltic Sea on the Danish-German border.

From a purely archaeological perspective there are minor quibbles. The radiocarbon dates are used inconsistently, sometimes without careful attention to the two-sigma error range, or to marine reservoir effects that may make the results from bone samples appear older than they are. The stratigraphy of what was a long-lived house, with at least one noted phase of rebuilding, is also reported in a very minimalist way, there being very few section drawings and no stratigraphic (Harris) matrix diagrams. Not all of the post-excavation analyses were equally complete. None of these issues, however, is likely to change fundamentally the picture that emerges of a prosperous Viking Age settlement.

What of the linkages with text? In the event, most are unlikely to be controversial. That Hrísbrú was the original site of historical Mosfell is convincing and the argument that it was thus the seat of a Viking Age chieftaincy also seems entirely plausible. What is likely to remain contentious is whether the empty grave under the chancel of the church at Hrísbrú once held the bones of Egil Skallagrímsson. This is not a fully testable hypothesis, so whether it is a question worth asking depends on one's paradigmatic alignment. That Zori, Byock and their colleagues choose to press the point is bound up with their ultimate goal, and they are emboldened by the knowledge that they would not even have found the (entirely subsurface) settlement without following cues from Egil's Saga. It seems likely that this example will divide the book's audience into believers and unbelievers but, when the dust settles, the study's lasting importance instead resides in its accessible elucidation of the materiality and landscape of a prosperous Viking Age farm.