Gunda Béla et al. (szerk.): Ideen, Objekte und Lebensformen. Gedenkschrift für Zsigmond Bátky - István Király Múzeum közelményei. A. sorozat 29. (Székesfehérvár, 1989)
Axel Sttensberg: Predecessors of the Chimney
PREDECESSORS OF THE CHIMNEY Introduction A fireplace needs no special construction. It may consist simply of a burnt spot in the soil-surface, and if so, it may be difficult to recognize by archaeological methods. There is a configuration of postholes, and one might expect to find some traces of the hearth, if the building had been a living house. At least there should be a reddish spot left in the subsoil, even if the top layers had been distrubed by ploughing, or there might be some concentration of charcoal, even in the topsoil. In European countries the building of a house and the clay-hearth in the top of a tree is unlikely, though this sometimes happens in the Tropics. But fireplaces have not always been placed in the centre of a house. They may even face one of its walls, even if the walls are of upright planks, as is noted below. The living room of a house, at least, needed a fire for heating and preparation of food. That is evident not only in our temperate climate, but also under tropical conditions, when people are sleeping naked around the fire even on cool nights. Not many years ago, most Danish archaeologists would expect that the earliest real house-buildings would have their support of posts dug into the earth. As a consequence, they thought that where no postholes were found, there would have been no house. This belief was in a way a consequence of the old axiom that development occurred along straight lines, supported by observations in biology made by Darwin and others of the most honoured prophets of the last century. So called “primitive” peoples and races were thought to occupy an aboriginal place compared with the white man in the early industrialized world, and historical development should somehow reflect biological evolution based on “Survival of the Fittest.” The present author has tried, in other connections, to demonstrate that man’s evolution has differed from that of other hominids, and in an increasing degree. Moereover, although on the micro-plane even brothers and sisters are differently gifted, on the macroplane there is no significant difference between the human races in inventiveness and ability to face challenges they have met during the last one hundred thousand years or so. As a consequence man’s technical development has been far too complicated to be described as following one distinct line forward and upward. History has many examples of how progress in one field led to regression in others, which does not affect the main impression that on the macro-plane we have evolved farther and farther away from our hominid origins. The conclusive step was the ability to express talk by written symbols in numerals and scripts. Medieval Cooking Pits in Zealand, Denmark The technique of cooking in pits by heated stones is well known from ethnographical records, and Grith Lerche has collected records from prehistoric Scandinavian excavations and right up to the time of the Icelandic Sagas. The practice was, however, continued through the Middle Ages until the end of the 15th century. In my excavations of Medieval villages in Zealand I found a pit filled with charred and broken stones at the Store Valby site, probably of the late Viking Period, but in Borup in the centre of Southern Zealand, charcoal from a pit in a small guard hut was radiocarbon dated to c. A.D. 1170. Two cooking pits dated to the 12th century were placed one inside farm 5 and another in the open air c. 25 m north of the farm house. This is similar to cooking pits I have seen in Papua New Guinea, some of which were placed inside a house, and others outside. The pit inside the living house 5 of Borup was centrally situated in the room, dug down into the mud-floor and lined with upright stones (Fig. 1). It was 115 cm long and 80 cm wide and c. 45 cm deep. At one end was placed a flat hearth-stone, serving for heating and normal foodmaking. At the opposite end of the pit was a shallow pit filled with charcoal in which the cooking stones had been heated. It was obvious that the woman of the house had had her route along one side of the pit to and from the fire-stone and the charcoal pit, for the upright lining stones of the cooking pit had been almost 77
