Den komplekse jernalderbosetningen på Dilling : Hus – gård – grend – landsby?

Abstract

Dilling, a few kilometers from the coastal town of Moss in Eastern Norway, is a site where archaeologists from the Cultural History Museum of the University of Oslo have examined c. 60,000 square meters of land and discovered traces of more than 130 buildings, graves, cooking pits and other evidence of lives lived during the centuries around the birth of Christ. Dilling is the largest settlement area from this era ever to be investigated in the region. Most of the buildings date from the Early Iron Age (500 BC–550 AD) and especially from 200 BC–200 AD, which saw periods of simultaneous construction on six farms in a transition from sloped terrain to clay plains.

Many who visited the excavations speculated about whether the buildings constituted a village – if so, the first Iron Age village in Eastern Norway, and one of very few in Norway. In this book, archaeologists and other experts discuss this issue and many others, such as the size and dates of the buildings, the continuity of the settlement, burial customs, what was grown, fertilization, the use of trees, and the effects of all of these things on the landscape around the settlement. The result is rare insight into how a settlement originates, evolves and at a certain point, comes to an end.