House of Questions

Bow and arrow were invented about 15,000 years ago, when the last ice age was ending. Before that, people used a stick to make their arm longer, thus enhancing the power with which the spear was thrown...

Both in the Middle Ages as in prehistory the same story: using a bread oven. For a bread, you need to grind corn (a very time consuming effort), make dough of it and let it rise with yeast...

Two methods were used to make fire. One was by striking a special piece of iron (strike-a-light) on a piece of flint. The other method is by friction of wood on wood. The strike-a-light was most common. Sometimes people used the back of a knife to strike sparks. Friction of wood on wood (“the old-fashioned way”) was used at religious occasions...

Roughly seen, there are two methods of fire making. The oldest way is the fire drilling: one mounts a wooden peg on a board of wood and rotates this peg quite fast. This way, the temperature rises where the peg touches the board...

During the Early Iron Age (500 B.C.-400 A.D.), people sacrificed mainly by placing the offerings in the water of bogs or lakes. To sacrifice in wetlands is a tradition which goes back to the Neolithic...

At least 2 million years ago, the early people started to use stones as tools. At first they used complete rocks as hammer, for example to open animal bones with to get to the tasty marrow...

There were sleeping places and benches along the walls. Sometimes, in one corner of the room, the in- built structure from horizontal logs was made, where house hold items of bigger size and tools were stored...

Excavated material permits reconstruction of the dress of the people living on the island. Women wore long linen shirts with half-length or full length sleeves. Simple wraparound skirts were made from a rectangular piece of woollen fabric...

The prehistoric canoes that have been found in the Netherlands are dug-out canoes. They were made of hollowed-out trees. In te forest a suitable tree was selected and probably on the spot shortened, debarked and hollowed out...

They sharpened the bottom end of the pile to a point using axes. They tied a cross piece of timber and attached it near the top. A person on either side of this cross piece could then twist back and forth to drive the pile into the bed of the loch.