ÁLFTAVER, ICELAND—Icelandic and British archaeologists employing geosensing techniques have detected the remains of a large building that may be Iceland’s lost Þykkvabær cloister, which housed Augustinian monks from 1168 to 1550. “I think we’ve just hit the jackpot, because I think we’ve discovered the remains of Þykkvabæjarklaustur. It came as a complete surprise, you can say that much. The remains are not on the site it was assumed the cloisters stood,” Steinunn Kristjánsdóttir told Stöð 2 television and reported in The Iceland Review. It had been thought that the cloister would be found near the present-day Þykkvabæjarkirkja church, where researchers have been looking for it. “It is very big compared to the buildings of the time—as it is from the Middle Ages—and the footprint is around 1,500 square meters.” He added that it is possible that the building was the cloister’s cow shed. To read more about life in medieval Iceland, see "Surviving the Little Ice Age."
