Slöinge
Project

Slöinge Home

Project
Excavation
Landscape
Methods
Halls
Guldgubbar
Finds
Mapping
1996-2000

References

Iron Age Home

In 1994 started the first regular excavation which was followed with another field campaign in 1995. The extent of the excavations was limited, but nevertheless, some interesting result were maid.

Photo: Magnus Stibéus, RAÄ

A sensational find was the preserved wood from the houses (e.g.remains of roof carrying posts).

Three fragments of posts have been dated by dendrochronology. The analyzed sequences indicates that House III - that is one of two large buildings in Slöinge - can be dated to c. AD 710.

This is the first prehistoric building in Sweden being dated with help of dendrochronology. Furthermore, this building is probably the oldest building dated with this method in Scandinavia.

We have so far found two large buildings (c. 30x8,5 m), House II and III, probably representing two phases in the 8th century.

Worth noticing is the fact that certain kind of artifacts like gold foil figures, glass beakers, debris of textile production has been deposited in the largest room of each house.

A similar pattern has been noted for the huge hall building that was excavated in Borg, at Lofoten, in northern Norway. Another parallel is to be found at the recently excavated site of Ströby, Zealand in Denmark and Helgö in Sweden. The largest room has obviously been used for cult and most certainly other official purposes.

Typical for sites, like the one in Slöinge, is the specialized production. For many crafts are the production waste hard to find with normal archaeological methods. That is why we has chosen to practice wet sieving, in a similar manner as was done in Paviken (Gotland), Sorte Muld (Bornholm), Lundeborg (Funen) and more recently in Birka.

The excavations in Slöinge has only dealt with very small areas. We have until June 1995 removed the top soil of only 1000 sq. meters out of 20 000 sq. meters with indications of settlement. Within these 1000 sq. meters has c. 1000 features been mapped and only 10 % has been excavated. Most of the excavated features belongs to House II and III.

Uppdaterad 2000-10-17 (96-02)
Lars Lundqvist