sociology

The uttermost importance in those days was that the small groups could hardly rely upon others in bad times: a failed harvest for example was a huge disaster...

On this subject, we unfortunately know as good as nothing, because the prehistoric people did not know yet how to write and therefore did not leave any written traces behind. As however it is important to a social group to be able to communicate, people surely must have used a language...

Until in the Late Iron Age (3rd century BC), people did not use writing. In general, therefore, we are dealing with an alphabetic culture, so we do not have any names form this time...

On the basis of research on 66 skeletons from a graveyard in Susteren (from around 800 to 1100 AD) we know that women on average reached the age of 44 years and men on average 38 years. The infant death rate must have been very high. About one third of the children died before reaching five years.

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.

Estimations of population numbers in the Netherlands in prehistory are based in information from ethnography, burial places, traces from settlements and many assumptions...