01. Five thousand years under one roof
The oldest known longhouses are about 7,000 years old and belong to Europe's first farmers. The building type then lives on across much of northern Europe until the early Middle Ages, when it is finally replaced by log houses.
A longhouse is carried on posts inside the building, with walls of wattle and daub or planks. The hearth lies in the middle of the floor, and the smoke finds its way out through a smoke hole in the roof. In the older houses, people and animals live under the same roof; later the house is divided into rooms with different uses.
During the Iron Age the houses grow taller and more elegant, and chieftains' halls can reach 50 metres in length. Such halls have been excavated at Gamla Uppsala and at Skrävsta in Botkyrka, among other places.
02. How to spot it
- 1.A long, narrow building – often 20–50 metres
- 2.Pairs of roof-bearing posts inside
- 3.Walls of wattle and daub or planks
- 4.A central hearth, a smoke hole in the roof
- 5.Curved long walls and narrower gables in the Iron Age
03. The giveaway
The postholes. What remains of a longhouse is usually just dark marks in the soil – the rows of postholes reveal the shape of the house to archaeologists.
Read the façade
- The smoke hole
- The curved roof
- Roof-bearing posts
04. Where to see it
- Gamla Uppsalaexcavated hall, about 50 × 12.5 metres
- Stavgard, Burs, GotlandSweden's first reconstructed longhouse
- Gene fornby, Örnsköldsvik
- Ale Viking Farm, Ale
- Foteviken Museum, Höllviken
- Ekehagen Prehistoric Village, Falköping
Sources
- Swedish Wikipedia: "Långhus (byggnad)" (bygger på arkeologiska rapporter för respektive utgrävning)