Iron Age

The composition of grown plants differs both regionally and temporarily and is dependent on the climate, local conditions, fertility of soil and so on...

The Stone Age people died - in respect to present - very early. Poor hygiene, illnesses, bad nourishment and burden of labour lead to an average life expectancy of 20-25 years. Many children already died in their first 4 years...

Remains of roofs are rarely preserved so we know little about them. They may have been thatched but at that time people did not grow corn with long stalks as rye later in Middle Ages and modern times and...

Technologically speaking, stone constructions have been known in Central Europe since the Early Iron Age. But in those times stone was rather used for city walls than ordinary houses, because of its limited availability...

They did not have chimneys in our sense of the word, but from at least the Bronze Age we presume that makeshift chimneys, for example made from wicker and daubed with clay would take smoke from hearths through ceilings...

It is a protection for the roof, to keep sparks from getting up in to it. Right now we have a piece of wool cloth, in our last house we had animal skin. As soon as we can we are building a frame of willow which we are going to coat with clay.

Well, from what we’ve seen we don’t need any more openings for the smoke to get out. The ones in each end creates a draft which makes the smoke rise up to the ceiling and escape easily without allowing any to be disturbing.

No, they had to bent to to get though the doors, just like us. Averagely, they were only 5 cms shorter than us today. The doors are small of two reasons:...

Well that is a hard question to answer, because no beds of any kind from the migration period in Sweden have survived until today. They may have slept in beds, on benches or maybe even in hammocks. What we can be sure of however is that they didn’t sleep on the floor.

Unfortunately large parts of prehistoric house walls are only rarely preserved to allow us to ponder the question of windows. In archaeological open-air museums they reconstruct windows according to traditional house building as very small which seems probable...