Stone Age Homes Used for a Thousand Years or More

Fretheim analysed information from 150 excavated Stone Age dwellings, extending from the northernmost county of Finnmark to southern Norway. Over half of them were excavated within the last 15 years, and it is the first time someone has compared the information based on the excavations.

Credit: NTNU

The remains of a Norwegian pit house from the 2003 Ormen-Lange project at Nyhamna, Aukra municipality, in Møre og Romsdal county in 2003. This pit house was in use for 1100 years between 5200 and 4100 BCE. The picture shows the sunken, rounded floor area with a central, stone-ringed fireplace and holes for posts along the walls. Photo: NTNU University Museum

The amount of relatively well-preserved Mesolithic dwellings in Norway is unique to Northern Europe, and Fretheim’s dissertation thus gives a new picture of the Stone Age population that also reaches beyond Norway’s borders.

“In other parts of the world, house remains and traces of people from the Stone Age are buried under today’s farmland, or they’re under water because the land along the coast sank after the last ice age.

“In Norway, though, stone-age remains have been preserved because the areas along the coast rebounded from the glacial weight of the last ice age instead. Another reason is that agriculture in Norway has been less extensive, and so it hasn’t covered the traces of the Stone Age. In Finnmark, where cultivated land is the least prevalent, it’s possible to see many traces of the oldest dwellings,” says Fretheim.

Not surprisingly, finding traces of 10 000 to 11 500 year old homes of people from the Mesolithic period is pretty limited.

Fretheim says archaeologists have found tent rings, which are stones that were placed on the tent flaps. They’ve also found cleared surfaces, with clearly defined concentrations of tool remains. Producing stone tools created a lot of debris.

The earliest homes were small.

Credit: NTNU

This is how a pit house might have looked. Drawing: Astrid Johanne Nyland

The floor area of these early dwellings “is almost always between five and ten square metres,” says Fretheim, “which may indicate that nuclear families moved around with portable tents. I think the tents were probably part of the mobile lifestyle ‘package’ that people travelled with.”

Several things happened 9500 years ago that impacted the housing and settlement patterns in Norway: the forest spread into new areas, the sea level along the coast stabilized and the final ice sheets from the last ice age retreated from the interior.

Dwellings then became larger. Instead of pitching a tent on the ground, the floor was partially dug down into the ground of so-called pit houses. The rest of the house was built up with a framework of wood and turf.

The largest pit houses were up to 40 square metres.

“Several families may have lived together, or perhaps hunting teams shared houses,” says Fretheim.
Landmark attractors

As the sea level stabilized, Fretheim believes it became possible for people to build their knowledge of the area’s natural resources, such as good fishing spots. This diminished the need to follow animals such as reindeer or seals on their migrations. People came to prefer living in areas with fishing and hunting conditions that were stable and varied.

The pit houses were kept up and reused to a great extent, with the most used ones being maintained for over 1000 years.

Fretheim thinks it’s fascinating to think about how these house remains affected people in the Stone Age and somehow kept drawing them back to those places.

“Physical objects made by people continue to affect people and landscapes long afterwards. I imagine that the pit sites that were visible in the landscape at the time helped to create the first cultural landscape. These were the first visible traces left behind, so people recognized those places and chose to rebuild there rather than in new locations. People became more settled and linked to certain sites because they saw them as good places to live,” Fretheim says.