On your right is a low corner building with pale stone walls, broad glass panels, and the Settlement Exhibition name set plainly on the facade.
This modest building protects one of Reykjavík’s biggest origin stories... and beneath it sits one of the oldest human-made structures yet found in Iceland. In two thousand and one, archaeologists opened this site before a hotel project could move ahead. They expected traces of early settlement. Instead, they uncovered a Viking Age hall - a longhouse - inhabited from about nine hundred thirty to one thousand, along with fragments of an even older turf wall just to the north.
That older wall gave the museum its unusual name: Reykjavík, eight hundred seventy-one plus or minus two. Here’s the trick. A volcano in the Torfajökull area spread tephra - that means a layer of volcanic ash - across Iceland. Scientists matched that ash with layers in Greenland ice and dated it to about eight hundred seventy-one, with an error margin of two years either way. So if a wall sits underneath that ash, it has to be older. Archaeologists don’t often get a timestamp that tidy.
And that is the heart of this place: not just age, but location. The ruins remain in situ, meaning in their original spot. No one boxed them up and moved them into a nicer room down the street. This is the actual ground where early people lived in Reykjavík. Back at Ingólfur Arnarson’s statue, we were standing with tradition. Here, tradition and evidence finally sit at the same table.
Inside, the longhouse stays exactly where the archaeologists found it. Its outer walls used cut turf blocks called strengur, basically sturdy slices of earth and grass stacked like building bricks, with some stone at the base. The roof was turf too. In the center lay a hearth, or indoor fire pit, and this one ranks among the largest found in Iceland from that period. Most of the floor was trampled earth, but one section at the western end had a timber platform, probably the householders’ sleeping area. Under that wall, archaeologists even found the spine of a horse or cow and other bones... a quiet little mystery tucked into the structure.
If you glance at the interior photo on your screen, you can see the broad hearth and the preserved wall lines for yourself. The city decided to preserve the find, and designers had to turn a basement space into something more memorable than, well, a basement. So they wrapped the hall with a dark-blue oval wall, added a glowing strip to mark the ground level where the ash layer fell, and shaped the floor with sea-washed shingle and gentle rises to echo the old gravel ridge between the lake and the sea. If you’re curious, take a quick peek at the before-and-after comparison in the app to see how the raw excavation became a full museum space.
The exhibition also shows Viking Age objects found around central Reykjavík and on Viðey, and it uses models, touchscreens, and multimedia to explain daily work, trade, and building without making the past feel like homework. That’s a fine ending for Reykjavík, really... the city introduces itself by lifting the floorboards.
If you’d like to go in, the exhibition is open every day from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon.
