Lava doesn't cover all of Iceland anywhere near enough to regularly bury things on that timescale. There was arable land and forest when the Norse came. There

Lava doesn't cover all of Iceland anywhere near enough to regularly bury things on that timescale. There was arable land and forest when the Norse came. There is some evidence that Irish monks were on Iceland before the Norse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iceland#Irish_monks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iceland#Irish_monks Were there another non-European population earlier, they would need to get there by sea. I would expect archeological evidence of sea-worthy ships, which we do for the Norse. It is a long way from Greenland to Iceland - far greater than the ~35 km from Ellesmere Island to Greenland, which is how we think the Dorset and Thule people got to Greenland. (And that was on the other side of Greenland.)