Early Middle Ages

Excavated material permits reconstruction of the dress of the people living on the island. Women wore long linen shirts with half-length or full length sleeves. Simple wraparound skirts were made from a rectangular piece of woollen fabric...

With wood and turf. A hearth can be found in virtually all excavated houses. Often this is a round spot with a lot of charcoal and orange burned clay. The hearths sometimes were constructed on small platforms...

For sure, people invented many other things earlier, like for example the use and keeping of fire. As many inventions, the wheel was first seen in the Near East, about 8,500 years ago. But these wheels were used as slow turning potter’s wheels. Pottery was already an old technology back then...

In the Early Middle Ages, active trading contacts developed in Latvia, also involving the inhabitants of the lake fortress. Imported jewellery and parts of weapons have been found in the cultural layer...

The language spoken in the Netherlands in the early Middle ages we now call Old Dutch. It’s actually a collection of dialects which were spoken in the Low Lands between 600 and 1200...

Āraiši lake fortress was attacked and destroyed in the late 10th century, and was never rebuilt. When the foundations settled and the water level in the lake rose, the building remains and artefacts ended up underwater, and in these anaerobic conditions they were preserved up to the present day...

Yes, the house was this long during its last phase of existence, but it had been rebuilt several times, so the length has varied.

It depends on what resources and materials were available. A possible estimate is one to two years (the reconstruction took one year to build), but we must also consider that the house seems to have been continually added to and maintained.

There were sleeping places and benches along the walls. Sometimes, in one corner of the room, the in- built structure from horizontal logs was made, where house hold items of bigger size and tools were stored...

Every dwelling house with its auxiliary structures was an independent economic unit. Each house would have been the home of one nuclear family, consisting of parents, children and grandparents...