Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2011, Page 38

TRBOJEVIC N., MOONEY D. E. AND BELL A. J.
temperature inside the house, but rather as
of range of temperatures inside rooms and
the main room. It is also important to
stress that while it could be argued that
these temperatures were unrealistically
high and that Viking Age people probably
didn’t enjoy this much comfort (e.g. a
similar experiment in Gene Fornby,
Sweden achieved average interior
temperatures of only 12°C (Edblom
2004), which seems surprisingly low), all
the participants in the experiment agreed
that they were comfortable and acceptable
for human habitation. Nevertheless, the
lower temperature in the end-rooms,
which closely follows the outside
temeperature and which was only
insignificantly affected by the heating of
the central room could be also a result of
relatively short time-span of the
experiment. We may assume that
long-term heating could result in
eventually higher temperatures than these
in the ending rooms since walls of the
house could easily absorb heat radiation
and retain it. This assumption, however,
remains unconfirmed until an eventual
long-term experiment.
The diagram above also shows how
long the sub-units of wood, each
measuring 20 kg, lasted. The rate of the
fuel consumption indicates that there was
no signifícant increase in the wood
buming throughout the night or during the
temperature changes outside. Thus, the
first sub-unit of 20 kg lasted 6h 15’, the
second 8h 30’, the third 8h 55’, fourth 8h
40’, and the fifth and last 9h 52’ (7h 58’,
see below), thus indicating a certain
variation in the consumption pattem over
the period. While the rapid consumption
of the first unit can probably be explained
in terms of the higher thermal
requirements of raising of the initial
interior temperature, the figure for the
final unit is expressed in two parts: a) the
time up to when the last piece of wood
was put on the fire (7h 58’) and b) the time
until the last ember died out (9h 52’).
Thus, the average consumption of
firewood at Eiríksstaðir was 2.28 kg/h or
54.72 kg per day (24 hours). However,
this does not mean that a house like
Eiríksstaðir would actually have used this
amount of birch every day during the
entire summer season. Variations in
consumption need to be considered, but
due to the time-frame of the entire
experiment, it is hard to express an exact
per-day variation in the consumption of
firewood as was done in the week-long
experiment in Lejre, Denmark, where the
daily variation was ± 4 kg (Skov et al,
ibid, p. 3802). At Eiríksstaðir, variation
could be expressed by a range of kg/h
values, and gained by calculating the
difference between average consumption
rate of each of the sub-units per hour, not
taking into account the rate applying to the
first sub-unit due to reasons outlined
previously, and accounting for the two
time values for the last. When this is
calculated, the variation in the
consumption rate ranges from 0.06 to 0.3
kg/h.
Though the temperature was
comfortable, the same cannot be said for
the smoke, which was, however, an
inevitable “companion” of the inhabitants
of Viking Age houses. Smoke was present,
though not to such a degree as to disable
the entire experiment. The ventilation was
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