Toskipede hus i neolitikum og eldste bronsealder

Abstract

The presence of the two-aisled houses of Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age has been scarce in the Norwegian archaeological record. After the introduction of the large-scale mechanical topsoil stripping method in Norway in the 1980’ies, more and more traces of the oldest prehistoric houses are revealed. This article looks into the two-aisled houses of Norway, with main focus on the houses found in the county of Rogaland. Only the houses with traces of the walls are discussed here. The nine two-aisled houses from Rogaland are found at Voll, Rennesøy (1), Talje, Finnøy (1), Jåttå, Stavanger (1), Kvåle, Time (2), Skeie, Stavanger (3) and Røyneberg, Sola (1). Similar houses are also found both in the northwestern and eastern part of the country. The transition to sedentary farming in Neolithic Norway is accompanied by an established two-aisled building construction similar to the contemporaneous two-aisled houses found in Denmark and Sweden. The similarity and simultaneous emergence of these two-aisled constructions over a huge geographic area in Norway indicate mobility and wide contacts between Neolithic Norway and the neighbouring areas. So far the number of two-aisled houses in Norway are very few, both compared to the number of Norwegian Bronze Age and Iron Age houses, and compared to the Danish and Swedish material. In view of the increasing number of Norwegian finds of two-aisled buildings just in the recent years, we will most likely see more of them in the coming years as the archaeological experience for finding them increase.