landnam

noun

1. (especially, uncountable)The occupation of land, especially if previously uncultivated.

   “Iversen holds that these changes indicate the arrival of farmers, the phase of Landnam or land occupation, that the charcoal comes from clearance fires; that herbaceous pollen suggests the opening-up of the land; cereals, fields; the plantains, weeds; and birch and hazel, regeneration of the forests after the exhaustion of the plot.”

   “On marginal landscapes and during unsettled times, the initial impact of landnam might lade away, and a new landnam would have to restart the sequence.”

   “Dyvik (Dyvik 1978: 34–5), who revised older theories about breaking and back mutation in North Germanic, assumed a common basis for the tendency towards breaking in pre-stages of Old English and Old Norse, which he dated very early, to the times before the landnam of the Anglo-Saxons.”