HODORF, SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN, GERMANY
Van Giffen's work in Holland was only a beginning. In
1936 Werner Haarnagel launched the first of an equally
exciting series of excavations in the adjacent coastlands of
northern Germany, where he discovered a Germanic flatland
farm of the first and second century, near the village
of Hodorf, Schleswig-Holstein, on the banks of the river
Stör, not far from its confluence with the river Elbe.[127]
It
consisted of a three-aisled dwelling with hearth, to which a
one-aisled barn was added axially at a slightly later date
(fig. 307). The construction method employed in this dwelling
was identical, in all details, with those of van Giffen's
houses at Ezinge: six pairs of inner posts serving as principal
roof supports, an outer perimeter of wall posts serving
as footing for the rafters, plus the customary envelope of
wattle walls running in total independence of the supporting
members. The aisles were divided into cattle stalls in the
rearward part of the house, as in Ezinge, except that in
Hodorf this area was entirely matted with wattlework. A
distinctive feature of the Hodorf farm was that its hearth
was framed by four posts which were out of line with the
principal roof supports and also differed from the latter by
being round. They were obviously not part of the regular
structural system. Haarnagel thought that they might have
carried a smoke flue, or that they belonged to a separate
inner armature of poles which carried an elevated section
of the main roof over an opening in the ridge above the
hearth site, serving as light source and as smoke outlet. A
similar arrangement of poles ranged in a square around the
hearth had been observed in other Iron Age houses in
vastly distant places.[128]
Haarnagel has reconstructed the Hodorf house in a handsome
model which is displayed at the Niedersächsische
Landesstelle für Marschen- und Wurtenforschung in the
city of Wilhelmshaven (fig. 308). While many of the details
in the roof section of this model must by necessity remain
conjectural, the concept of the house as a whole is unquestionably
sound. The pottery found in the Hodorf house
indicated as time of occupancy the first and second century
A.D. Toward the close of the second century the site was
imperiled by tidal inundations. Its inhabitants made an
attempt to save the house by filling it up inside with sand,
a little more than 2 feet above its original floor level. A
number of posts were reset on this occasion, and the roof
may have been replaced entirely, but in all other respects
the house remained the same, except that now it was used
exclusively as a dwelling. It continued to be used in this
form until the end of the third century when it made room
for a new but smaller house of the same construction type.
