Prehistoric Houses

This volume on the Bronze Age and Iron Age houses of the Northwest European lowlands and (west)central Europe is the product of Peter Donat’s long-standing interest in contextualising the house-building traditions of southern and central Germany. Following his retirement, he took upon himself the challenging task to inventory and compare house plans from the Bronze and Iron Age in a geographical zone spanning Denmark, the Netherlands, Flanders, Germany and extending eastwards into the Czech Republic and Austria. With the numbers of house plans already known from these areas and the rate in which developer-led archaeology (p. 11) increases this in various nations, this is no small endeavor. In this sense, P. Donat’s inventory is foremost a bold and much-needed overview of West- and Central European housebuilding traditions that will serve as a starting point for the contextualisation of settlement excavations across these regions. Numerous overview plates of house-plans (put to the same scale) and convenient maps (figs 7; 9; 16 and 35) help the reader take in all this information. Peter Donat has managed to collect, digest and present an utmost valuable inventory of West and Central European Bronze and Iron Age house plans, and has done this with tremendous attention to detail and an appropriately critical view (e. g. pp. 33; 131; 137; 184; 190). It will provide a much needed and helpful starting point to many scholars in the areas under study to contextualise their newly found house plans. Moreover, it unlocks a wealth of data on specific house-elements such as sods walls, byre partitions, partitioning walls or hearth locations, for which it is very hard to acquire a supra-regional overview.

Various lines of evidence are reviewed in order to describe in as much detail as possible the form and construction of a pre-European Maori house. The exact fl oor plan, the shape of the posts, and their material were known from archaeological evidence. Sparse archaeological evidence of other pre-European buildings and early historical records provided a basis for estimating details such as side wall height and slope, height of ridgepole and angle of roof. There is no firm evidence about the exact nature of the roof construction or the thatching of walls and roof. It is possible that in some details of its structure the house more closely resembled rectangular buildings in tropical Eastern Polynesia than historical Maori houses. The question of whether the house contained carvings and if so what they were like cannot be answered with confidence. Each aspect of the form and construction of the house is discussed and the basis for each proposed detail is documented.

The daub from the Final Bronze Age settlement at Roztoky represents the largest the largest analysed assemblage of its kind to date in Bohemia (11,690 pieces, total weight of 495 kg). The characteristics of the daub were described using a uniform descriptive system. Attention was paid to the size parameters of the fragments (weight and surface area) and several other attributes (colour, material and firing); the types of imprints from wooden structures were also recorded (type of construction element, type of imprint, shape of obverse side and fragment preservation). Daub fragments have produced large data set concerning building techniques and housing culture. The remarkable rich assemblage (759 pieces) from silo no. 15.2 provided a unique look a tone specific Final Bronze Age construction technique.