Iron Age

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...

Not much survived because original floors have been destroyed by erosion. Hearths are preserved more commonly (from the Aeneolithic on they were carefully built from daub, stone, isolation layers of bark and so on) or arched ovens...

There were 100 houses in the fortress with a total of 700 – 1000 people staying. The area of an average house was 70 – 90 square metres. Each house was divided into...

The prehistoric houses as reconstructed in Archeon have small or no windows. Most light enters through the door and the smoke holes under the roof. Besides this, the open fire gives some light. Honestly, we do not know...

We have never recovered any prehistoric toilets. When excavating settlements from this period, usually many traces of pits are found, but in most cases it is impossible to see what exactly they were used for, for storage, garbage or something else...