viking houses

dublinviking

i was wandering if anyone knows if any of the viking houses discovered in ireland or england had a stove or a fireplace placed in the corner of the house instead in the center.

dr gonzo

dublinviking wrote: »

i was wandering if anyone knows if any of the viking houses discovered in ireland or england had a stove or a fireplace placed in the corner of the house instead in the center.

Not an early medievalist but viking roofs tended to be quite steep, so a fire in the corner wouldnt be the safest, or the most practical in terms of heat diffusion. My understanding (specifically of the Type-2 houses) is that the corners were generally used for storage.

dublinviking

thanks gonzo

i am looking for this actually:

...nearly square, partially dug out house, each covering the area of 6.2 to 19.8 (14.0 on the average) square meters. A stone furnace was usually placed in a corner...

so not an open fire but a stone furnace...

dr gonzo

dublinviking wrote: »

thanks gonzo

i am looking for this actually:



so not an open fire but a stone furnace...

Oh, very interesting! As you can probably tell, Vikings are not my area

dublinviking

hi gonzo

the house type i am looking for quite specific and probably doesn't exist in ireland. i was just chancing my arm.

so your understanding of viking houses is quite ok.

straigh A and a golden star.

rebecca_ib81

Are you talking about a northern European type grubenhauser, or sunken-floored-structure (SFS for short)? What is your original site? I have a phd in Viking houses, so I can help you out, but I'd need a bit more context! Of my records of 200 hearths in Irish Viking houses, 7 were not central and of those, 2 were in the corner. If you're looking for sunken-floored houses in 8-12th century Ireland, you need to look at Hiberno-Norse Type 4 houses or look at the EMAP reports for details of rural sunken-floored houses. From 12th century on, you get the beginnings of cellared buildings in towns. Hope this helps!

tac foley

Skara Brae, perhaps?

rebecca ib81 - that's a very small area of knowledge to have a doctorate assigned to it, if you don't mind me noting. I have only an MSc in remote sensing and that occupied a huge area of multiple subjects.

tac

rebecca_ib81

Hi tac foley,
Well, to get a doctorate, essentially, you must become an expert in a defined area in a required amount of time, 3-4 years usually. A successful phd is very well focussed and defined, and looks at either a topic which has not been explored before, or a topic which needs re-examination, either because it hasn't been looked at for a long time, or because you want to apply a new methodology or approach to it.
I looked at Viking houses in Ireland and Britain, from a particular viewpoint, applying a series of different analytical approaches, touching on issues of building construction, household composition, gender, ethnicity, the Viking diaspora, the usefulness of surviving literary records (e.g. Old Icelandic Sagas) to this topic, rescue archaeology, migration, questions of artefact deposition, deposit formation processes, religion, modern re-enactment and experimental archaeology. But, if I had explained all that detail to the OP, I would (probably) have scared them away, so I said that my phd was in Viking houses - simple, and to the point!
And in regards to Skara Brae, are you thinking about the Neolithic settlement, as those houses had central hearths rather than corner hearths. The structures the OP talks about are quite small, and square-ish rather than rectangular, whereas (generalisation here!) the vast majority of Viking houses, i.e. longhouses, are big, rectangular affairs.

dr gonzo

rebecca_ib81 wrote: »

I have a phd in Viking houses, so I can help you out

Hi Rebecca, welcome! Do you mind if I ask where you did your Phd, purely out of curiosity?

rebecca_ib81

Dr gonzo, the phd came from the hallowed halls of Belfield...

(UCD just in case!)

dr gonzo

rebecca_ib81 wrote: »

Dr gonzo, the phd came from the hallowed halls of Belfield...

(UCD just in case!)

Ahh, my own Alma Mater. I assume our very own Aidan O'Sullivan supervised so?

rebecca_ib81

Yes indeed he did. Although by the end, he probably wished he'd never encouraged me in the first place...

dublinviking

hi rebecca

thank you for your reply.

i am looking for pit houses with corner stone or clay oven. yes they are of northern European type grubenhauser, or sunken-floored-structure (SFS for short).

i am doing inventory of these houses across the viking world of the 8-12 century. considering that they are found in all the other countries where vikings had their settlements, i was wandering if they would popup in Ireland as well. i have a reason to believe that there should be quite a few of them.

i am aware of the type 4 houses. this is what i found so far (not much)

Type IV buildings were of a completely different construction, and they and the Type III houses represent the period of highest building density during the Viking period in Dublin. They are rectangular in shape and are built with a sunken floor dug into the clay, somewhat like the Grubenhaus buildings of Germany or the belowground storage buildings or defensive enclosures of early Ireland, but they resemble most closely a building technique more common in England than in Ireland. They seem to be of a comparatively early technique, and will be discussed more extensively in the section on Waterford, where they were more common....


...The ancestral tradition of these building types seems to have been a prehistoric rural house type common to Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Three-aisled construction is known in Scandinavia during this period, but is by no means common. Similarly, no common Scandinavian house types are found in Dublin; this would argue for the local development of the Dublin houses. The homogeneity of building construction in Dublin would therefore indicate a “high degree of cultural integration” and point to an established, ordered Viking society who assimilated various building traditions in order to best accommodate themselves in Ireland....

...Six Type IV houses were excavated in Waterford, as opposed to only two in Dublin, and their location in Waterford may be the reason for their greater popularity there, though they were no longer built after the middle of the twelfth century. Whereas the Dublin pit-houses were dug into clay, which does not drain water so easily, all the Waterford houses were located in gravel subsoil, which would provide drainage quite easily. They were dug to a depth of 1.5 meters, and the upcast positioned around the perimeter of the pit to a buildup of about .5 meter above ground. The house would be entered through a sloping, stone-lined staircase or passage, and through a doorway set in a squared jamb. The walls were of radially split ash staves set vertically in a narrow trench along the base of the wall, and the substantial earthbound support posts would be set along the side walls and in the corners of the room, with two posts resting on plank base plates positioned toward the center of the room. This hefty frame may have supported an upper floor that would have been accessible from the street, but conclusive evidence for the upper floor does not survive. ...

...The Ribblehead site outside of Dublin shows a Viking-Age farmstead dating to approximately 850-875 CE, excavated in a limestone field outside of York. The farmstead consisted of three buildings, the largest of which, measuring 19 by 4 meters, is assumed to be the farmstead and primary residence. It is constructed of an inside layer of limestone slabs and an outside layer of placed stones, infilled with rubble to be almost 1.75 meters thick. The gable ends curve in a half-circle and have “centrally-placed paved doorways” built from 50-kilogram stones. The floor is made of sandstone paving slabs, so it is not possible to discern post holes or any hearth area, but the western wall features a row of limestones parallel to and butting the limestone paving, interpreted as a bench like those in the Type I houses, but the paving stones change direction toward this side, and that could imply some sort of partition from the rest of the house.

The second limestone building measured only 6 meters by 3.3-3.7 meters and is nearly rectangular in shape. Its doorway is double-walled, paved with sandstone and widens outward. The function of this building is unclear, but in the northeast corner, a twenty-centimeter flue is place above limestone slabs atop broken sandstone pieces, possibly indicating an oven or kiln of some sort. A third building was quite poorly built, and by iron-rich cinders and working stones found inside, it was quite likely a workshop.

Each of the buildings “clearly” had ridged roofs of thatch or turf extending to a point close to the outer edge of the wall, as the roof could not have shed rain anywhere else. Debate continues as to whether these roofs were straight, hipped, or gabled, but general consensus at the site was that they would have been hipped.

where is the other house with the corner oven? also, did the other houses with ovens which were not central have one or two ovens?
did you come across any pit house with a clay oven or at least burned clay deposits in a corner which could indicate a clay oven disintegrated by water erosion?

this is the primary type i am looking for

http://books.google.ie/books?id=JvNr3lmmmHgC&pg=PA212&lpg=PA211&ots=z77Vtk_r-Q&dq=pit+houses+with+corner+oven+norway


thank you again for your help

rebecca_ib81

Hi again, I'm afraid I don't have time til after Christmas to reply in detail, but if you pm me your email, I'm happy to continue this discussion via email. May be very obvious, but have you checked the following research:
Pat Wallace, 1992 book Viking Age Building of Dublin, Hillary Murray 1983 BAR report & 1979 (?i think) journal article (full references in Wallace's book) and the discussion of sunken buildings in MF Hurleys 1997 Viking Age Waterford book.
Happy Christmas!