She explained that there is a history of building turf dwellings in similar latitudes as Iceland's – notably in northern Norway's Sámi settlements, on the Faroe Islands, in Greenland and Newfoundland, and even as far south as Scotland's Outer Hebrides. But Iceland's stand out from these for a number of reasons: they were in use for a significantly longer period of time, they were used by all classes of people, they served as everything from sheep pens to churches and they are generally better preserved today.
