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
Fig. 1. Farm No. 5 of Borup Village. A Cooking Pit lay in the centre of the living room, lined with upright boulders. Those at the right side had been broken into pieces probably because the heated cooking stones were sprinkled with water in order to produce more steam before the pit was sealed by cowhides and/or mud on top. Behind the pit was a shallow charcoal pit in which some of the cooking stones had been heated. In front left is a hearth-stone upon which meals could be prepared e.g. by toasting, or flat-bread might be baked. Ax. S. del. totally broken by sprinkling water on this side, while the stone row on the opposite side and at the end, opposite the hearth-stone, was intact. From my observations in different regions of Papua New Guinea I know that initially, when cooking is prepared, one has to put fire in the bottom of the pit, and while the embers are glowing, fist-sized stones are placed on top of them. When the cooking stones are so hot that one cannot touch them with the bare hands, they are covered by green leaves to produce steam. The meat is placed on top of the green stuff and covered by another layer of green leaves. In the meantime other stones have been heated in a fire at the edge of the pit. They are lifted by means of wooden tongs, cleft at one end an kept open by a small inserted stone, and placed on top of the green leaves. They are covered firstly by another layer of leaves and finally by a thick layer of mud so that not the slightest trace of steam is allowed to escape. In Borup no green leaves were available in winter time, so that the housewife had to sprinkle some water on the contents before they were totally covered by cowhides and clay. Instead of leaves they probably used withered grass or the like, and to keep it from taking fire it had to be soaked and sprinkled, with the result that the lining stones on the side, from which this process was carried out, had eventually split and broken into pieces and powder. A big heap of charred and broken stones of late Medieval date was excavated about 160 m north of those just mentioned. At first this grass-grown heap looked like a small burial mound from the Viking Period, but when we ecxavated a quarter of it, layer by layer, it proved to consist exclusively of broken stones. It had been heaped up from waste over a hundred years from a cooking pit somewhere in the neighbourhood. The oldest dating at the bottom was, c. 1395 A.D. and the youngest 1480 A.D. Apparently the heap had not been in daily use. It was a result of occasional celebrations with the feeding of many people at certain times. This explains how the tradition could survive until about 1500 A.D. at a time when the site of Borup had been abandoned for almost two hundred years. We were happy enough to find a plausible explanation for this old phenomenon. At one end of the old village site of Borup, founded c. 700 A.D., was a circular platform, at the centre of which stood a huge beechtree, called “The Dancers’ Beech”. When our investigation of the abandoned village of Borup and its adjacent fields in the woods began, about 19501 had talks with some very old men from the neighbouring village of Reinstrup. They remembered why the giant-beech had got its name, because when they were boys about 1880 it still happened that the youth from this and a neighbouring village in the parish of Gunderslev went to the Borupris wood at night in the early summer when the beech trees had fine light-green foliage, to dance on the platform below the huge beech. The musicians sat on benches in the crown of the tree and played violin and wind instruments. How old this tradition was, nobody could tell. But when we made an excavation at the platform it was proved that the tree had its origin some hundred years before the village came into existence, i.e. early in the first millennium A.D. The tree had been renewed more than once, and in the late Medieval period a principal renovation had taken place,—just at the same time as the heap of cooking stones mentioned before grew into a small mound. It struck me that a written source from early in the 16th century had mentioned a guild or corporation in the parish, called “Vor Frues Horing i Gunderslev”, i.e.”the Guild of Our Lady in Gunderslev”. “Our Lady” was of course Maria, the mother of Christ, and the guild had existed during the Middle Ages, so that the feasts celebrated at spring time in Borupris must have been in honour of the Holy Virgin. “Horing” is, however, a late form of the early Medieval ’’Hvirving”, which was a special form of guild derived from the heathen period. It means people gathered in a ring, a circle, where they were supposed to drink beakers of mead in honour of the gods, “Minnebeakers”, and before people turned to Christianty the predecessors of the Holy Virgin were, of course Freya and her brother the god Freyr, both of them concerned with fertility. In that way we were lucky to find a plausible explanat ion for the late convivium of Borupris. Open fireplaces and ‘ ‘ Brand stones'" at Borup. The houses of the Borup village as well as of the demesne farm that took over the farmland about 1000 A.D., were constructed of uprights of wood without posts dug into the earth. This confused us at the beginning because we could localize the approximate size and shape of buildings, and there was reddish clay where the fireplaces had been. The surface hard-pan of the fireplaces had been destroyed by later ploughing, but they were similar in shape to other fireplaces I had excavated at Medievel sites. In constradistinction to Iron Age fireplaces these had no bottom of paved stones. They only consisted of a burnt spot on top of the subsoil with some reddish colour fading downwards. In some of the sites, however, were found large flat stones, some of which could be proved to have been exposed to hot fire. The first one, 1.30 by 1.60 m size quite evidently used as a hearth, was situated in the Demesne Farm No. 4, and a shallow oval pit with charcoal was placed beside it (Fig. 2). The surface of this stone had been partly broken between the harder layers of gneiss, while the decayed parts 78
