Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1943, Page 135

EXPEDITION TO ICELAND IN 1939
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and thus can be sure that the house was desolate and had been
left long before this time the masses of ashes at Stöng filled the
rooms in such a way that it admits of no doubt whatever that
the ashes had blown in while the roofs still were there and the
houses were in full use. There has been a tendency to believe
that the rain of ashes with its burning masses imprisoned people
and animals in the houses, which at the same time were set ablaze.
It can be stated with certainty that this was not the case. The
ashes probably were hot, though not so hot that they set the houses
on fire, these showing no traces of fire action. To the disappoint-
ment of the archæologist, but to the good luck of the inmates of
the farm, they had time enough to leave the houses, and there
were found no skeletons of unhappy people who had suffered
a painful death under the cover of their sleeping skins. Further
they obviously had time to remove their personal property, thus
extremely few objects of value being found at the excavation.
The fireplace in northern climates must always be the cen-
tral point of the dwelling as source of heat and light during
the long winter. The Icelandic fireplaces are fairly simple. In
the middle of the mud floor there is a fire trench edged with
flagstones. As a rule, however, part of the floor is covered by
a rather large flat stone, which has been made friable by fire
and has been used for cooking, especially the baking of bread.
The arrangement is well-known from Norway. The cooking
proper, however, both in early and later types of houses was
made on smaller fireplaces in more casual places, thus in the
living-room of Stöng against the gable wall. But there are also
larger, regularly dug, up to 70 cm. deep cooking-pits, which
are also well-known in Greenland sites, and which must have
been in use in all Scandinavia, but for that matter are known
from the dwellings of hunting people all over the world. In
such a pit the meat is “seethed,” covered with hot ashes and
heated stones. There is much to indicate that on the whole this
is the only kind of hot food known in the Icelandic household,
for in the relics the cooking vessel is missing. Steatite vessels,
which in the Norse settlements in Greenland are dominant in
the finds, and which have played a considerable part in the
Viking Age of Norway, are nearly completely absent, and
practically no potsherds were found. We have then left the pos-
sibility of cooking vessels of iron or copper, which were indeed
known in Scandinavia, but these must have been rare and costly